Alright. It's less then 24 hours now until the Euro will be a legal tender. Judgement Day is near, or €-day as they like to call it. Everybody's gonna have to adapt to the new type of currency. They created all new coins and all new notes for it.
12 countries all with the same type of currency:
- Germany
- The Netherlands
- Belgium
- France
- Luxemburg
- Greece
- Spain
- Finland
- Italy
- Portugal
- Austria
- Ireland
I feel it's a little frightening to see our o so stable Gulden go and get replaced by this Euro. What if things go totally wrong? What will happen then? Maybe better not to think about that...
At least the Euro lies quite close with the Dollar. So that would help me with the calculations all the time. That's right. They let our Gulden stay together with the Euro until the 28th of Januari. That's gonna be a really confusing period.
But what else is there to do? What about converting all the coffee machines or soda machines for that matter. They all need to be adjusted so the new coin will fit. My country (The Netherlands) has about 140,000 of these machines. Out of these, 100.000 need to be converted manually. The rest is of modern age technology and they can be converted by remote control.
Converting such a machine manually will take about 2 hours. A mechanic has 1,200 productive hours a year. After January the 1st, 2002, the date at which the Euro will be legal, there will be 200,000 hours of work to be done. So for a transition period of 6 months, there are 300 to 350 mechanics needed. The machine-exploiters are having trouble to even get that number together, so they are never gonna get the 2,000 mechanics which are needed for the transition period in only one month!
What would be an obvious solution here? Make sure that the machines can take both the Euro and the Gulden? That is technically impossible. So all the machines that can't be converted in time, will be non-operational as of January the 1st 2002. That is gonna cost the machine industry millions of Guldens and Euros.
So as you can see, and this is only a little piece of the problem, it's not gonna be easy and there will be a lot of money lost. I just hope that all will go well and also that I will soon adapt to the new way of payment.
Now to end this post, I'm gonna place the table of currencies in the same order as the list above:
DEM 1.95583 = 1 Euro
NLG 2.20371 = 1 Euro
BEF 40.3399 = 1 Euro
FRF 6.55957 = 1 Euro
LUF 40.3399 = 1 Euro
GRD 340.75 = 1 Euro
ESP 166.386 = 1 Euro
FIM 5.94573 = 1 Euro
ITL 1936.27 = 1 Euro
PTE 200.482 = 1 Euro
ATS 13.7603 = 1 Euro
IEP 0.787564 = 1 Euro
And last but not least:
USD 0.8827 = 1 Euro
Now I wish everybody a
Happy New Year 
, and for those who need to deal with all this too: good luck.
€ € € 
....
