Frank Kusy's Blog - Posts Tagged "monopoly"
HOW TO STAY A RUPEE MILLIONAIRE
Once you’ve become a rupee millionaire, do not sit on your laurels, it can all fall apart overnight. Here’s a few useful tips to help you stay on top:
1) CUT LOOSE PSYCHOTIC BUSINESS PARTNER
The final straw, when it came, was brutal.
Spud had sold the entire contents of his van to another wholesaler – and for a lot less than it had cost to buy them.
‘Half that stuff was mine!’ I raged. ‘And you sold it at a loss?’
‘None of your business. I’ve been asking around, and you’re the one who’s been giving people big discounts. I always wondered how you sold more than me, and now I know. You’ve been undercutting me for years!’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But you’ve cut your own throat in the process. That van had over fifty grand’s worth of stuff in it!’
‘So what?’ shrugged Spud. ‘Call it a lesson.’
I went very quiet inside. ‘This is the end of the road,’ I said. ‘You’ve just lost yourself a partner!’
‘Yeah right,’ mocked Spud. ‘You leave, and you’re good as dead!’
2) EMPLOY A BORING ACCOUNTANT
On my own now, and faced with a massive VAT bill, I rang my new accountant Gerald and asked his advice.
‘Okay,’ drawled Gerald. ‘Do you want me to have a word with them?’
‘Oh, could you?’ I said sweetly. ‘You’re so very good at this sort of thing!’
And with that I sat back by the phone and waited. I had drawn Gerald, an immovable force of verbal tedium, into negotiations with the VAT man, an irresistible object of trained tenacity. Gerald was at once the most polite and the most boring person on the planet. Nobody, to my knowledge, had ever finished a conversation with him without wanting to die.
Sure enough, when the phone rang it was Gerald, and he had good news.
‘I’ve just been onto the VAT,’ he droned ponderously, ‘and I spent over an hour explaining your situation to them.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, just as I was about to explain everything for the third time, I heard this low moan at the other end and they hung up on me!’
3) CHECK INTO REHAB
Shopped to the tax man by Spud and addicted to Valiums, I hid out in a drug detox ward.
Nights were the worst. That’s when the communal dormitory turned into a living hell of snoring, hallucinating, screaming psychos. They’d been issued their daily ration of methadone earlier in the day, and it hadn’t been enough. I jammed in my earplugs to drown out their nightmares, but I couldn’t sleep. My body, pumped up with enough sedatives each night to tranquillise a full-grown pony, was suddenly wide awake.
I lay a prisoner in my bed for hours. When I did finally drop off, I woke to find a razor at my throat.
‘If you snore one more time,’ whispered a ghostly voice, ‘I’m going to slit your throat.’
4) PLAY MONOPOLY, INDIA STYLE
Each time you go buying in India is like a game of Monopoly. You start out with a fixed amount of money to spend, a clear idea of what to buy, and a fairly clear idea of who to buy it from. But then you begin to move your piece across the board and the whole neat strategy quickly disintegrates. The dice fall for you, but mainly against you. And for every plus card you draw – like cheap merchandise, good foreign exchange rates, and fun travelling companions – you get a lot more penalty cards, like national strikes, early monsoons, and unforeseen sickness. Somewhere along the line, inevitably, you’ll run out of money and start playing on credit. And that’s when it gets tricky – because while Indian traders insist that ‘credit is not a problem’, if you didn’t pay them back soon, it’s a case of ‘Go to Pakistan, go directly to Pakistan, and don’t come back...ever!’
1) CUT LOOSE PSYCHOTIC BUSINESS PARTNER
The final straw, when it came, was brutal.
Spud had sold the entire contents of his van to another wholesaler – and for a lot less than it had cost to buy them.
‘Half that stuff was mine!’ I raged. ‘And you sold it at a loss?’
‘None of your business. I’ve been asking around, and you’re the one who’s been giving people big discounts. I always wondered how you sold more than me, and now I know. You’ve been undercutting me for years!’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But you’ve cut your own throat in the process. That van had over fifty grand’s worth of stuff in it!’
‘So what?’ shrugged Spud. ‘Call it a lesson.’
I went very quiet inside. ‘This is the end of the road,’ I said. ‘You’ve just lost yourself a partner!’
‘Yeah right,’ mocked Spud. ‘You leave, and you’re good as dead!’
2) EMPLOY A BORING ACCOUNTANT
On my own now, and faced with a massive VAT bill, I rang my new accountant Gerald and asked his advice.
‘Okay,’ drawled Gerald. ‘Do you want me to have a word with them?’
‘Oh, could you?’ I said sweetly. ‘You’re so very good at this sort of thing!’
And with that I sat back by the phone and waited. I had drawn Gerald, an immovable force of verbal tedium, into negotiations with the VAT man, an irresistible object of trained tenacity. Gerald was at once the most polite and the most boring person on the planet. Nobody, to my knowledge, had ever finished a conversation with him without wanting to die.
Sure enough, when the phone rang it was Gerald, and he had good news.
‘I’ve just been onto the VAT,’ he droned ponderously, ‘and I spent over an hour explaining your situation to them.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, just as I was about to explain everything for the third time, I heard this low moan at the other end and they hung up on me!’
3) CHECK INTO REHAB
Shopped to the tax man by Spud and addicted to Valiums, I hid out in a drug detox ward.
Nights were the worst. That’s when the communal dormitory turned into a living hell of snoring, hallucinating, screaming psychos. They’d been issued their daily ration of methadone earlier in the day, and it hadn’t been enough. I jammed in my earplugs to drown out their nightmares, but I couldn’t sleep. My body, pumped up with enough sedatives each night to tranquillise a full-grown pony, was suddenly wide awake.
I lay a prisoner in my bed for hours. When I did finally drop off, I woke to find a razor at my throat.
‘If you snore one more time,’ whispered a ghostly voice, ‘I’m going to slit your throat.’
4) PLAY MONOPOLY, INDIA STYLE
Each time you go buying in India is like a game of Monopoly. You start out with a fixed amount of money to spend, a clear idea of what to buy, and a fairly clear idea of who to buy it from. But then you begin to move your piece across the board and the whole neat strategy quickly disintegrates. The dice fall for you, but mainly against you. And for every plus card you draw – like cheap merchandise, good foreign exchange rates, and fun travelling companions – you get a lot more penalty cards, like national strikes, early monsoons, and unforeseen sickness. Somewhere along the line, inevitably, you’ll run out of money and start playing on credit. And that’s when it gets tricky – because while Indian traders insist that ‘credit is not a problem’, if you didn’t pay them back soon, it’s a case of ‘Go to Pakistan, go directly to Pakistan, and don’t come back...ever!’
