Oh, I knew how many Tens were in it, and I knew what multiple or factor of several numbers it was,
but I couldn't comprehend its worth.
Maybe this is easy for everyone else, but unless I can relate a value to some object you can get for it, it's really just a string of numbers followed by zeroes.
Now, I struggled with the new Ghana cedi like most did after 2007, but no, that wasn't the cause of my cluelessness.
Take 4,000 cedis and 40, 000 cedis for instance. After I finished secondary school in 2002, by the the old denomination, not adjusted for inflation, that would have been 40 million and 400 million cedis respectively.
In my mind, That was 'a lot of money' and 'even more money', but what did 'a lot of money' buy you?
I had no concept of the cost of land, cost of a car, a house or regular salary. The largest cost I knew of, was that of my College fees and that was an arbitrary number. 'A lot of money' basically.
My personal costs were not even in the 100s of ghana cedis. A box of indomie, a dress shirt, a tube of DVDs or a plate of check-check. Multiples of ones and meer tens of cedis.
It took me starting to think more and more about the cost of a start-up house, salary for a year, cost of a used car etc, before these strange numbers begun to stop rolling around in meaningless strings of commas, zeroes in my mind, and slightly larger numbers became more real -- At least as real as was the case for a National service person with zero previous work experience, earning GHS 250 a month.
But then, how was I supposed to feel about the magnitude of such figures?
Like, what is the difference between GHS 4,000 and 40,000?
I mean, '4,000 ghana'. That's big, right?
CEOs and managers would talk about a company of interest making profits well over GHS 200,000 and I'd only gotten used to quickly calculating that that was 4 billion old Ghana cedis. Billion? These were simply fantastic figures to me.
I mean, 'Who MAKES 4 billion?', I thought. What does 4 billion even look like?
How long could you live off that? Could you buy both the house and car, or only the car?
To me, anything over 1,000 was so out of what I could save up to in a couple of months, it simply faded back into 'commas, number and several zeroes'
But this is what happens as you get older and start thinking more and more about not just those needs, but what to do to get those needs met. How fast can you make GHS 5,000? How fast could you double that? And how much did you need to increase your revenue to save 50,000?
These weren't thoughts I had previously considered. And frankly, it felt like I had been thrown out of my comfortable life of academic workout and ephemeral social adventures straight into one where my mind was constantly crunching numbers about everything -- Especially since failing to do so could mean the difference between a salary that survived till the next salary day and one that depleted on 23rd of the month.
Yes, that's another thing that happens when you fly the coop; or even if you don't, when you start being the breadwinner or as much of a contributor to house bills as your everyone else. Everything past breathing the free air COSTS money.
Your salary 'drops', the counter is reset for a split second to that value, then it begins counting down to 0 again - and nothing can stop it. You can slow it down, or speed it up, but from the moment you're paid, you're spending.
Now, I catch myself syncing my data bundle with my bank account balance, to inform me on how fast each will diminish based on my current rate of expenditure and data use, without even refering to my budget in MS excel.
And yes, I found myself voluntarily using that too. Who would have figured I'd whip out my laptop just to fire up that most-annoying of applications. A thin that once upon a time was only of interest to me when I wanted to print names by rows and columns, or accidentally clicked it instead of MS Word.
Because when you're paying rent, working to keep having food to eat, thinking of what's reasonable to bill a client, accounting for cost of your transportation, upkeep etc, GHS 4,000 and GHS 40,000 are no longer just 'a large amount of money' and 'an even larger amount of money'. They aren't even numbers any more or meer nouns. They transform into adjectives; describing words with a value that is all too real to you.
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