Had to return to LebarProm because they had a problem... they paid up the workers' transportation refunds (i.e. anyone paid their own commuting costs, and then got reimbursed at some standard rate, getting the actual amounts would involve more paperwork than it was worth)... for november 1993. In the then dinars, which not only had nine zeros more than today, but were also 12 million into one new dinar. So if bread was 0,25 dinars a loaf today, that was 3,000,000,000,000,000 of november dinars.
So I tried to insert the amount there, and bang - the sum total of the year no longer balanced. Why? Because it came down to an amount, at the 13. december denomination by six zeros, which had more than 15,5 significant digits. It actually should have had about 24, as the remainder was six digits long. Ah, six... I proposed to stuff this thing into the ledger on 14. december, so it would have six digits less. Which was the only possible thing to do to still fit it into 1993, and they reluctantly agreed. I moved the date of the transaction to two weeks later, re-ran the denominations and, voila - everything balanced down to a single worthless dinar.
Later, it turned out to be an exercise in futility. The crazy 1993 will be missing from statistics, from anyone's salary history, from anything that involves calculating any averages, because no matter what you add up, that year would produce a few wildly outstanding numbers which would mess any average taken, sometimes by factor or two or up to ten. So it was erased from the financial history.
Anyway, starting today we have a new dinar, Avram (after Dragoslav Avramović, the chief of national bank), worth 1 DEM or 13 million old dinars, inflation is revoked by fiat. Then it was announced that the exchange rate between new and old dinar would float, which happened exactly once - it was 12 million the next day, and didn't change after that. For two or three more months all the firms had two accounts at sdk - the existing one for old dinars, and the new one for the new dinars, with all the digits the same except the first. That first digit was once reserved for some other republic, perhaps Macedonia, which didn't matter anymore. Then that chaos cleaned up gradually and nobody ever mentioned the old dinars anymore.
Upon leaving LebarProm I bought, at the kiosk by their gate, a loaf of bread worth 0,25 Avram's dinars. I was on my bicycle, and just remembered that I'd be going home in an hour, so bringing fresh bread would be a nice thing to do. It was a nice feeling, to have some cash in my pocket and not to worry that it may lose half the value by the time I get home.
Thirty years later, on burundi, one Fica wrote this:
Speaking of te funy papers, let's remind ourselves:
On first january 9 zeros were removed and new banknotes were isued. Te smalest one was tis one, wic was wort les tan te ink in wic it was printed, so tey didn't even boter wit printing serial numbers.
In te first tree weeks of january, te inflation went on wildering so te largest banknote printed in tose tree weeks was a 10 000 000 dinars banknote. It was te old one from 1993 on wic te year was printed over.
On 24t january a new denomination ocured and 1 new dinar was wort 13 milion dinars from te first half of january, or 13 000 000 000 000 000 dinars from december 1993 or 13 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 dinars from september 1993.
(translated from engrbian haircut latin into equally haircut englis, by my osisaj.prg script, qv. in Notes)
