the swiss and their payments

you would think that switzerland is a relative modern nation. well, that is so, but not when it comes to payments. people use the 'yellow giant' aka 'the post' aka the monopole on sending mail and money handling. instead of e-banking one goes to the post office to pay. that is not so strange i can hear someone say. i think otherwise. one has this little yellow book. one has to transcribe all the recipients and amounts from the cheques you have received. so in a family that might be over 20 payments per months. no easy automatic payments from your account. no! you copy everything in the little book and also have to be sure that if you have to fill out the checque yourself that you copy the right amounts from the invoice, the right name and all be written in blu ink, and only blu ink. all that done, then you get out your calculator w/paper, and make an addition. you rip off the paper with your addition. you clip this with a paperclip to your checques and/or little yellow book. you go to the bank!!!! and then you will take out the amount of money you need to have to make the payments. then you drive to the post office to get your duty done. this would probably be between the 27 th and the 3rd of the month.(the right moment to make a good robbery on all those persons;). in switzerland one only pays once a month! and we are not talking about carrying around 300 swiss francs or so. it might be upto 15000 CHF or even more. i am not kidding. the teller in the office will take all you stuff. register the checks with a machine which will also give the total amount of what you have to pay. stamp all the checques twice. stamp your book. and sign each payment in the book and the cheque twice. then will rip off the small  of the cheques and give them back to you. then you will be asked to tell the amount that you thought should be the outcome of the calculation. if those figures even than you can pay. if the figures are not the same the teller will count the cheques again on a separate calculator. and in the mean time ofcourse you have asked back your little piece of paper and cheques and you check if you have typed every sum of each cheque. the only thing why paying this way is very good, it because it makes it very easy to do some money laundrying. a number of people wil be paid in cash, p.e. in construction work. and no one knows where the money comes from. the payment will cost the recipient about 2,35 CHF or more. if i ask my patients to pay directly at the bank they say it is very inconvenient and difficult because they have to fill out a form on which the have to write the recipients name, IBAN and amount to be paid. they will go to the post because it is so much easier.

the cheque, w/stub

the little yellow book

i have never been so exhausted writing a piece on my blog! and i hope you all got it and are not too confused.  

vitrage curtains

yesterday, while riding my bike, i got the idea for another bit to write. driving by houses, i thought why the heck do you have windows if you always have the vitrage curtains drawn? wouldn't it be easier to have a house without glass that you are going to cover anyway? cleaning windows is a big nuisance to get them clean without wiping signs, so you would not have to do that anymore. taking down vitrage curtains and bring them to the dryers costs time and money, so you could save. the whole building project would cost you loads less. they just have to lay bricks without a care and put in one hole for the door to be placed! why would you want to shut out your surroundings? don't you want to see your garden and don't you want sunlight to enter your home? ticino is sooooo different from holland. one day a patient of mine said she went to amsterdam and she was so suprised to see furniture stores everywhere. she did not understand she was looking into our homes. in holland we do not draw curtains, although in the last couple of years, people who live on very busy streets have started to put sticky fancy plastic on their windows to keep glares out. you can look in but then you would have to bend over or stand tiptoed and that would be a bit obvious. per se dutch people do not look into the houses of others, so why should we put up vitrage curtains? we might have curtains to be drawn in winter to keep out the cold and to make the house more cosy. and the foremost important thing about dutch having no vitrage curtains, is that we say "look into my house, we don't have anything to hide". here in my new homestead people have windows no one ever could look into because the house is surrounded by a garden with a very high hedge, so why hide? then we also have the electric blinds which will come down on the push of a button. every night, even in summer, at about 7 pm you will  hear the first ones go down, zzzzzzzzzzzzzz, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. my god, they are sitting in the dark, and might have to turn on a light! i can tell, i think we dutch are healthyminded;) all the rest has an edge;)