Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/122153
insider o Illustrati ro jimww. n: w k o.u s.c ger Going against the grain Vomitoria, Journalist, novelist and public speaker Sue Webster is part of the third generation of a dairying family and director of a company that specialises in agricultural and financial writing. central heating and crucifixion … those Romans sure were an inventive bunch. However, their biggest hurdle to ultimate civilisation was the inconvenient fact that they got paid in salt. As a medium of exchange it seems a mite fiddly. Admittedly, there would be some advantages. Modernday economies, faced with fiscal cliffs, have to dash out more dosh. The senators of Rome only had to evaporate a few salt pans to boost national liquidity. However, the average Roman worker would have been very worried if they got caught in a sudden downpour. Talk about capital meltdown. A hole in your pocket would have meant asset trickle-down. And small change must have been a real nightmare. These days, blokes put thick billfolds in their shirt pockets to make women talk to them. But what options were available for a love-hungry Roman?* The corrosiveness of salt is very possibly the main reason why the Romans never invented cash registers or ATMs. The development of online banking would likewise have been hampered by dependence on sodium chloride. How do you send all that salt across the ether? How do you retrieve payment from your laptop? Shake it out over the chicken casserole? Likewise, the fiscally unique island folk of Yap must have had a very difficult time adapting their currency – large rocks – into e-transactions. Try pushing some of those boulders down the information superhighway. These days, with or without lumps of Yapese granite, the online banking landscape is already pretty chunked up. When we're not online shopping, diagnosing ailments or seeking an SWF FWB with NSA, we're doing the banking. Increasingly, we've overcome the cutely named 'trust gap' and decided to consign our life savings to a haunted fish tank powered by chips and hanging around in a cloud. Now, there's an image to inspire confidence. Personally, I prefer automated tellers to real ones. They usually have more personality. And, at the end of a transaction, they don't ask hopefully, "Anything else I can do for you today?" Being confronted by that question across the bank counter is like being served by a grill jockey – only with fewer tatts – asking the equivalent of "Fries with that?" I was tempted to throw in a banker joke to finish. But then I realised that bankers don't think they're funny, and normal people don't think they're jokes. *Maybe that prompted the original Latin lover. When in Rome, woo like the Romans woo … or not. 87