busker

Dollar dolour

"Main Entry: do·lour", reads online Merriam-W, "chiefly British variant of DOLOR."

Now that is precisely where British spelling beats American hands down. The very impact of the word hangs on that lugubrious 'u'. Anyway ....

To my bank to collect my paltry £s sterling and Travelers Cheques for the coming jaunt. I get the hot teller, which cheers me somewhat as I peer at the dismal exchange rate - 2.0049 - ye gods, this would never have happened in the time of the Empire. I comment despairingly on my appalling timing of buying foreign exchange "when the dollar's on the floor." "Yeah," laughs Hottie, "'on the floor'".

She flashes me a look as if I'd used some masonic phrase only found in one used to dealing with money, and lots OF it.

I have no idea where it came from. It is utterly not me. Far more likely I'd stumble around with something about it being a " ... nuisance to be going when the dollar is ... has all this problem going for it ... not ...", thus identifying myself as a typical thicko who *would* be ordering actual pounds sterling at a time like this. I confide in her that it'd've been more sensible not to have taken any money at all but relied on prostrating myself before my family and scrounged off them.

Which sets me thinking how my brother would have handled it - much more along the lines of the excellent Gary Cole in Office Space:

"Yeahhh ... so, Chris, I'm going to need you to go ahead and finance my whole trip while the dollar's on the floor ... yeah ... and I'm also going to need you to loan me a coupla gabrillion lira til the Contessa comes thru with the retainer, Mmmk?"

To which I of course would be nodding like some in-car ornament - nay, *thanking* him, even, for his guidance on such an overwhelmingly sensible way to handle the whole drat situation.