CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

PAST

When I first moved to Bulgaria my family and friends back in the UK would eagerly ask me what it’s like over there.

“Moving to Bulgaria,” I would reply without any sarcasm, “well, it’s not like moving to another county - it’s like moving to another PLANET!” Bulgaria was so different in so many ways from any country I’d lived in or even visited. It truly felt like a different planet.

For example, one time a family stopped their car in the fast lane of the motorway / freeway to pick mushrooms in the central reservation. They were completely oblivious of the Semi Trucks and cars sliding sideways to avoid them, this is considered normal behavior in Bulgaria. Under communism it was a mitigating factor that if you were drunk when you ran someone over in your car, how could you possibly steer straight with a bottle of Rakia in you? Forget about DUI’s here.

The law on ID cards, that every Bulgarian follows to the letter, says you must at all times, carry your government ID card. I knew a guy who drove back from his hotel in Sofia to his apartment in Burgas to get the ID card he’d forgotten, a 600-mile journey.

‘Why?’ I had asked him genuinely interested.

‘Because it’s the law, you have to carry your ID card at all times,’ he replied.

He is correct, you can be fined $50 for not carrying your ID card BUT there’s another law in Bulgaria that states a police officer cannot issue a fine without first seeing your ID card! SNAP! No fine. (It cost $100 in gas for the trip!)

The Bulgarian strangeness that most impacted daily life for me? Bulgaria is an entirely cash based economy. They don't use credit or debit cards, nearly all company invoices are settled in cash. People even turn up to buy a house with carrier bags full of used notes.

For me this meant a daily trip to the bank for cash. Usually 10,000 лв or 20,000 лв Bulgarian Leva, about $12,000 US. 20,000 лв is a huge and highly inconvenient brick of cash. If it’s 20’s then the pile is 8 inches high. It is also a pain to count out, so for my business we would weigh the money. This was an amazingly accurate method of calculating how much money you had.

Contrary to logic there’s an astonishingly small difference in the weight of a dirty, tattered old note and a brand new one, milligrams. A 20 лв weighed 0.82g, a 50 лв was 1.0g and a 100 лв was 1.2g. I had a large, high quality set of milligram “Jewelry” scales. I'm sure someone, somewhere in the world must have used them for jewelry, but we got them from the same shop everyone gets them from, the shop that sells bong’s, grinders and extra-long Rizzla’s, aka the drug stuff shop. This weighing method was accurate to within 1 note in 1,000 I.e. 20 лв in 20,000 лв or 0.1%. That was enough for me.

Another business issue that I came across was accounting for who had what money, the money was going out in so many directions so fast, up to 20,000 лв a day, that normal accounting methods simply could not keep up. If we had accounted for every penny given to every person to pay for stock, half the orders would never have gotten packed each day.

The solution - we photographed the money. The recipient was handed a stack of cash and I photographed their hand on the fanned-out money, with the date and geolocation stamp on the frame. The returned cash was counted by weighing.

The method was incredibly accurate and sped up day to day business immensely. We only “accounted” when there was a discrepancy. On my 27” iMac I could clearly count the individual notes any employee had been given, their hand was undeniably their hand and the date was embedded on the picture. The weighed money being accurate to one note in 1,000 actually meant 100% accuracy as no one ever returned 20,000 лв, they would be returning maybe 2,000 at most. That gave an accuracy of 0.1 of a bank note.

Today I didn't need an accuracy of 0.1% to know that $10,000 had gone missing.

I’d walked into the office with $10,000 in 100 лв National Bank Bulgaria bank notes, a smaller than usual stack at only 4 inches. But now I didn't have the 4” stack of $10,000.

The office was a busy place, we were picking, packing and shipping 200 international orders in the first four hours of the morning. Ruby and R2 worked on in the afternoon, and we had an average of 700 items of stock arriving every day from multiple suppliers. We also had 400 items a day getting barcoded and shipped to F.B.A. in the UK and if that didn’t make my day chaotic enough, we had Ruby telling everyone how no one understands how hard her life was. Amongst all the voices that were talking, yelling and laughing back and forth, I could still hear Ruby giving her daily Sopolly Report. This was all taking place in a building of only 300 square feet. I could describe the daily commotion in one word – overwhelmingly hectic. OK two words.

I’d defiantly entered the office with the $10,000, just 30 minutes earlier and I definitely did NOT have the $10,000 NOW. There were two safes in the office, one for small sums of money in the entrance and one for larger sums in the administrator’s office; but both were empty.

When I first entered the office, I had been met with the usual hundred or so requests for decisions, and of course I was forced to give my views on the sexiness of Ruby’s rear in her new red Philip Plenn jeans. That’s another thing ‘from another planet’. In Bulgaria you don't so much get accused of sexual harassment in the workplace as you get accused of insufficiently sexually objectifying your female employees.

On more than one occasion I’d had one of the girls ask for a meeting in my office, only to arrive demanding to know what was wrong with her butt? Did I not appreciate the way the new jeans made it look? Did I not appreciate the fact she had climbed the stock ladder three times when I was down at the office? What was the point of a girl looking nice when she came to work if she was not going to be appreciated? Did I want her to come to work in ugly sweat pants and an old T Shirt? Hell no!

With time I learned to make an extra special effort to look over the girls, admire the eye candy they offered, always making sure I didn’t forget to let them know how great they looked and they appreciated my…. sacrifice.

Another Bulgarian trait I found especially difficult to be get accustomed to was the girls and the toilet. Conversations were not something to be interrupted by the call of nature. The conversation would continue through the toilet door - if I was in the office. If, however, I’d just arrived mid pee, the door would be wide open and the two employees chatting as if nothing was amiss. Which for them, there wasn’t. But my girls took it one stage further. In western society it is customary for a girl at work to pull up her panties, jeans or skirt before she leaves the toilet. Not for my girls. My girls would waddle out with their jeans around their ankles while struggling to pull up panties while waddling back to their desk, or, if they had a question, they waddled right up to me. I had many serious business conversations with a semi naked employee while she adjusted her panties, gashtie in Bulgarian, so they fit just right, before pulling up her jeans

OK, back to retracing my steps, where on Earth did I leave that stack of money? My first intention had been to go straight to the main safe but I’d gotten embroiled in one of the myriad of issues plaguing my every day, or more likely I’d got embroiled in admiring Mimi’s butt in her new red Philip Plenn jeans. They had a chrome octagonal button fascinatingly placed exactly where it shouldn't have been, right where the entrance to her vagina would be. Mimi kept pressing it and pretending to excite herself as she wandered around the office. Clearly, I’d never made it to the safe.

So where had I left it??

I did the usual ‘where are my car keys’ routine and traced my steps back from the moment I walked in. The last place I’d had a clear memory of having the cash was at R2’s packing station. That couldn't be a worse location, completely opposite the main door. Even worse, there’d been three deliveries in the last 30 minutes, any one of the delivery drivers could have walked out the door with nearly three years’ wages in his hand.

Yet worse still! I realized it was lunchtime, every member of staff had been out of the door to grab a bite to eat since I’d arrived, any one of them could have walked out the door with the $10,000 in their hand.

I had a very novel, possibly unique, accurate system worked out to prevent the pilfering of small amounts of cash from the day to day transactions but I’d literally never thought about a system to prevent the stealing of huge bricks of money!

It was turning into a bad week, no a terrible week. I’d lost $45,000 IN ONE WEEK!

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