Is it all just a radio stunt?
Be careful what you hold up to the light lest the truth be revealed, writes David Slack.
Any bar, Anytown, USA is a great place for a drink. The guy looks at you levelly, says ‘what can I get you’, or maybe just looks at you until you tell him. He doesn’t pretend to be your long-lost friend. He doesn’t ask how your day’s been so far. He doesn’t say ‘awesome’.
You enjoy your drink, and the next one, you maybe watch the game, you enjoy another drink, you talk to Kyle and Luke. They have a drywall business and a pickup truck and stories. The guy behind the bar joins the banter and you’re all having a time. Then you hand him a fifty and he takes the note and holds it up to the light and looks at it slowly and carefully because, nothing personal pal, but you never know...
The world gives you these small reminders when you set out from sweet trusting New Zealand: your money may be good someplace else but I’m just going to put it under this UV light.
Maybe sweet, trusting New Zealand is changing, too. I haven’t been to SkyCity for a long time but it seems like the sort of thing they’d do.
But Lower Hutt? There’s no high-roller room at Westfield Queensgate. You take something out of your wallet that looks more or less like a $50 note, you should be good to go. Is it purple? Does it have a kokako? Here’s your change and have a nice day.
The people in Lower Hutt are good, decent, regular, friendly people: people who listen to Rihanna on The Edge, and watch Real Housewives of Auckland and think, is this someone’s idea of a joke? Then in the morning they go back to work at Unichem or SpecSavers or Pita Pit or Noel Leeming, and if they’re unlucky someone walks in with a wallet full of fakes.
In the Hutt Valley a few ratbags have been using today’s most excellent colour printers to make $50 notes that will get accepted, without being held up to the light, at many Lower Hutt shops.
Let’s say you buy a 100-inch flat-screen TV with the dud fifties. You take it out to the carpark, lift it into the van, take it to the Porirua branch and tell them you want to return it. You just have to say ‘‘did you see Real Housewives of Auckland last night? Man, TV’s not worth watching any more, bro,’’ and they’ll take the TV back and hand you a fistful of legal tender.
But before you fire up your colour printer, you should know this: the cops have
Once you start holding notes up to the light, you start wondering: what else is real and what is not?
already turned over a ‘‘Lower Hutt residence where a number of printers were located’’. Also, if you’re using any amount of printer ink at all to make these notes, you’ll need to make sure you’re not running at a loss.
There’s a bigger story here, though. Once you start holding notes up to the light, you start wondering: what else is real and what is not? Trump can’t be real, can he? Surely. And if he’s not, what else is fake?
We’re told that John Key is Prime Minister. But would a real prime minister be getting into a prison cage with a cake of soap because breakfast radio asked him? Would he be saying with a straight face that his Government is doing everything it can to make houses affordable?
Would a real district council and a real government have so little idea what to do about the state of our water?
Would a real government have let so many Christchurch people wait so long to get their houses fixed? Would a real recovery minister have let things go so badly that many homeowners now have to have the whole shoddy job done again?
Would a real government be choking the rights of MPs to bring legislation into Parliament by stuffing the ballot with nonsense bills about lost luggage and company notices?
Do these Auckland house prices have a 1 in front of them that wasn’t meant to be there?
And even if you could get me to swallow all that, am I supposed to believe people really pay that much for a Deadly Ponies bag?
I’ve got fifty bucks says the whole thing is just a really bad radio stunt.