The most cash I've ever carriedThere's nothing like carrying large amounts of cash to make yourself feel simultaneously like a lottery winner and an obvious target.
A friend went to buy a car for ten grand, panicked and stuffed it down his pants for safety. It was all a bit smelly by the time he got there and he had to search around for some of it...
Tell us the story behind the most cash you've ever carried.
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chthonic, Thu 22 Jun 2006, 10:39)
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$100,000 of the Russian Government's moneyMy company does dull financial services stuff which includes the occasional rating of the Central Securities Depository of various countries. These are basically places that keep safe the shares and bonds for the entire country. We went to Moscow to rate a Russian depository and were taken to see the vault, first passing through various identity checks, x-ray machines, airlock-style capsules etc. - very James Bond! The vault was basically the entire basement of the building. In one room were the certificates for all of the government bonds of the Russian Federation - many, many millions' worth.
Apart from all of the armed guards, security cameras, thick steel doors and walls etc. it looked like any other drab Russian office: several rooms, some desks, lots of filing cabinets. Our guide opened a filing cabinet drawer and handed me a single sheet of paper which turned out to be a bond certificate worth $100,000. There were dozens of these filing cabinets in the room, all stuffed with these certificates, some even worth $200,000.
Funnily enough, the armed guards weren't too impressed with my pantomime of slipping the certificate into my pocket... It was quite an experience being among so much concentrated money in a real-life fuck-off Russian government vault, even if there wasn't a hope in hell of getting hold of any of it!
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numberbruncher - correct by nature, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 0:48,
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