Family

I spent half of yesterday doing something I didn’t want to do (trying to find a courier) so I could do something else I didn’t want to do (send my signed sale agreement and associated documents to my lawyer in Wellington). At one office a lady quoted me 330 lei (about NZ$120) for an estimated delivery time of two weeks. Sorry, what? Did I hear that Romanian number correctly? Trei sute treizeci? Doamne. After biking here, there and everywhere, and finding offices had been relocated to other parts of the city, I found a place that could get it to NZ in two days for $100. It was 5:05 by then, and too late for them to send it. I’d have to wait till the morning. But then I thought, that’s still bloody ridiculous. Bugger the body corporate committee and their fake urgency. Who knows when they’ll even invoke the agreement. I popped it in the normal post today. That cost $10. They said it would be there in nine working days. I know we’re talking about property and six-figure sums—hopefully I’ll still get a six-figure sum if and when the place sells! I paid $354,000 for it 8½ years ago—but I couldn’t handle the principle of blowing a hundred bucks (for probably no reason) on sending a sodding envelope.

Yesterday I also had a genuinely urgent situation to deal with. This laptop was making a racket. I was sure it was the fan. (It has a solid-state hard drive.) If my laptop dies, I’m pretty seriously compromised, especially in the world of online lessons. I told four of my students that our lessons probably wouldn’t be happening. I backed up my data and in the morning I took it in to the repair shop down the road (just before Piața Bălcescu). In no time they had the back off. The thermal paste (which I’d only just learned about) had turned to dust, and two blades had detached from the fan. This will be expensive. And slow. Blow me down, at 3pm I got a phone call to say it had been repaired. It cost me 150 lei ($55). I’ll still need to source a fan from Ebay – it’s hard to get a replacement in Romania – and they’ll be able to fit it for me.

On Saturday I went on my first decent bike ride since we locked down in March. I did my usual trip to Sânmihaiu Român. I’d forgotten how noisy the Bega gets with all the frogs. Yeah, I do need to get myself a new bike.

On Friday morning I had coffee on the sunny balcony of one of my students. We spoke Romanian for an hour in a low-stress situation, and I felt a certain sense of pride at being able to communicate reasonably well in someone else’s language. It’s such a rewarding feeling, especially because Romanian is both beautiful and an unusual language for people to learn.

Mum was telling me that she’d been to the funeral of a woman I knew in Temuka. She would have been about 85. She was from an enormous Catholic family – ten children I think – but never had a family of her own. She was a very kind person, but quite shy. I went to see Whale Rider with her in Geraldine in March 2004, days before I moved up to Auckland to take that job. Apparently she had a habit of arriving at church late and leaving early – perhaps she didn’t want the conversation – and the priest joked that she was on time for once. Mum also recently went to her 95-year-old aunt’s funeral in Mosgiel – this was her mother’s younger sister.

New Zealand is at Level 1. They seem to have crushed Covid. Apart from the fact that it’s now hermetically sealed, everything is back to normal there. On the phone, my parents and I joke about NZ’s “smug level” (that’s after my aunt described NZ as being unduly smug about their low case numbers). Both my parents would prefer to be back at Level 4, I think. Dad’s migraines are an ongoing problem and he quite liked being unable to see anybody. As for Romania, we’re doing pretty well in Timiș with very few new cases, but in the rest of the country this thing sure isn’t going away. Around ten Romanians are dying every day on average.

I’m going to start tonight’s post with a simple game. If you can guess how many Romanian lei are in my bank account, I’ll give you all of it. (In reality I won’t. I can’t. But just imagine for a second.) Actually, to make it easier, you don’t have to guess the full amount, but just the first digit. Given that there is some money in there, i.e. it’s not zero, what digit (from 1 to 9) do you choose? Maybe you’ll choose 5, because it’s in the middle. Perhaps you’ll pick 7, your favourite number. It really doesn’t matter, because they’re all just as likely as each other, right?

Wrong. With absolutely no other knowledge, you should absolutely pick 1. Always. I can guarantee that around the world, there are currently more bank balances with 1 as their first digit than any other. There are quite a few 2s too, but certainly not as many as 1s. A little further behind are 3s, and so on. Comparatively few begin with an 8, and even fewer with a 9.

You see this pattern over and over again. Population sizes (or areas) of towns, cities, or whole countries, lengths of rivers, volumes of lakes, market caps of companies, speakers of languages, vote counts, and so on. Anything that can exhibit a large range of values will show a very similar distribution of leading digits, skewed heavily towards the lower digits. (Not everything works this way, for instance the ages or heights of the people you work with.)

There’s a name for this phenomenon—it’s called Benford’s law—and it has even been used in forensic accounting. People have completely fabricated figures and come unstuck because what they thought were random-looking numbers started with unnaturally many 7s, 8s and 9s. The coronavirus pandemic—where cases increase exponentially—is a perfect example of Benford’s law in action. Look at the case figures for countries or regions and you’ll see a definite bias towards lower initial digits. Heck, you can even see it on my chart below.

As I was writing all of that, I got a phone call from the elderly lady who lives with her husband on the sixth floor. It was a pleasure to talk to her. She was replying to the note I’d sent her, asking if they needed any help with food or other essentials. She said they have people staying from outside the city (breaking the lockdown rules, but hey). Her prediction for the end of lockdown—1st May—is unfortunately wishful thinking. She asked me what my religion was, because it affects what version of Easter I celebrate. I get that question quite often and I always say that I’m a Catholic.

My aunt called me earlier today. She seemed extremely concerned, as if Romania had 4300 coronavirus deaths and the UK 150, instead of the other way round. It’s never that easy talking to her, because she doesn’t really listen. Still, she was thinking about me, and I appreciated that. She also lives on her own, so I’d better call her next weekend.

Here is the latest chart: