Desperate Times

While I was attending a lunch for private sector economists on a lush country estate the other day, the latest unemployment figures for South Africa were released: Since December 2008 almost one million South Africans lost their job and 500000 were made unemployed in the last quarter alone. Ouch - these figures hurt!

Reading this made me feel slightly bad about complaining about the lack of tea in the office the other day … clearly there are people who suffer a lot more from the global economic crisis (I could offer you ten different terms for this…. I’ve used this phrase a lot in the last six months!) than I do and this became painfully obvious the other day…

While I love my car very much, I have to admit that I am not very good looking after it and in the ten months that I have had it, it’s not been treated to a single wash. I park outside most of the time, so normally I just let the occasional thunder storm do the job. However, it’s not rained in a while and even I had to admit that it was time for a wash. Unfortunately I had not had a chance so that my car was more black than white when I drove to a gym on Saturday morning. It wasn’t my usual gym and I wasn’t entirely sure where to park, so I decided to leave my car on the pavement watched by a car guard. The guy approached me and offered to wash my car - great – just what I had been waiting for! Unfortunately I had no money on me and only found 4Rand in my car ... For those of you who don’t follow currency markets on a daily basis, 4Rand is about 30p or just over 35c. I told the guy that I would have liked to take him up on his offer, but I only had 4Rand on me and would not be able to pay him …


When I got back to the car after my workout, I almost walked past it: my dusty dirty grey “clunker” was transformed into a shiny, sparkly, as-good-as new car! The guard had decided that he would rather wash my car for 4Rand than miss out on it …. 4Rand … 30pence! Would you ever wash a car for that amount of money? In fact, would you do anything for 30p?

Times are hard, the recession is affecting us all … but some clearly suffer a lot more than others…