The best part is that I don't quite remember when did we do this, but... we both took loans, to build the house. Still having the account at Ljubljanska, this must have been while I was still working in the school and yet already on first name basis with staff at stambena, so just around now, give or take a few weeks, after paying the fine and the contribution for the utilities.
My half of the loan, that is, was in Ljubljanska bank, while hers was in Banatska. The loan was awarded on the basis of hard currency sold to the state. You sell some to the state, and then get a loan sized three times that amount. Inflation ate both - true, the rate at which you sold the currency was well below the street rate, but then also the monthly installment would be eaten soon, its real value would diminish each month. Within less than five years, the installment came to be less than the administrative fee on the virman on which I paid it.
The current trouble was too much currency. The maximal installment, as per current regulations, couldn't exceed one third of my salary. Which was usually no problem, as people would scrape some modest amount, triple it and still never breach that limit. But we already had german marks from before, bought some along the way, and a contribution from tanti or her german kin would drip from time to time. So it accumulated, and the turkey in Ljubljanska can't calculate backwards, from my maximum installment to how many marks to take. She calculated it once forward, applying to the amount in marks first the currency rate, then times three, then the few factors by which she would get the value of the monthly installment - some six or seven multiplications by various coefficients she found in printed lists. But the opposite problem was beyond her abilities. I suggested that she can just divide by each in turn - a series of multiplications took her from left to right, so a series of divisions... "I do not come to your workplace to teach you how to do your job, so you don't interfere with mine!". Okay... though, if she overshot my maximal rate by a factor of, say, 2,5 - she could just divide the amount in marks by that factor... oh, well, let's sit this one out, be patient, be patient. Well I'm just a simple mathematician, what do I know... Took her twenty minutes, by redoing the same six or seven multiplications on various trial-and-blowjob attempts until she came satisfyingly close to the amount. And so we got the loan, and paid the appropriate amount in german marks for it. Which left us with more than half of those... well, next bank.
Then we walked to vodotoranj, to repeat the same thing in Banatska banka, for her half.
We finished that and went to stambena to transfer all of that to our account there. Which took altogether thirty minutes for the money to land - the sdk was blazingly fast even then. A couple of weeks later she gets a statement from Banatska, where some, not even remotely trivial, amount is charged for some "intercalary interest". What which dick, what's this?
Few days later I got hold of Baja and asked him the same question: what the fuck is this? Ah, he said, that's the intercalary interest. Yeah so what is it, what is it charged for, how is it calculated? It's for the amount you were given as a loan, for the period between the allocation and the moment you actually started using it. So what's the rate, if they got this amount over a period of thirty minutes? Um, actual period is irrelevant, they don't even look at any fucking dates, they have twice a month a session when they register the loans given and charge this interest on loans registered last time. So no matter what, it's always half a month, who fucks reality. Who cares about real dates - they have their own dates, duly defined, written down and verified. Pay and enjoy the ride.
Aaargh, banksters, banksters. Socialism, capitalism, they don't give half a fuck, they only care to invent a way to make money out of nothing. Correction: to take YOUR money for nothing.