Wednesday 7 October 2009

One hundred trillion dollars

100 trillion dollar note
Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe
Our pub quiz team won a special round on last night and were awarded a whole collection of junk and joke prizes. I got to take home the purple fairy wings. :-) We divided up the toffees, someone grabbed the magnetic snakes and ladders game, but we all had our eyes on the money: a 100 trillion dollar note from Zimbabwe. (Count the zeros - there are 14!) We speculated what the note might be worth; guesses ranged from $NZ5, $NZ10, a can of Coke, or even a negative value. I took a quick photo of it with my phone camera before one lucky team member finally claimed it as hers.

This morning, she emailed the rest of our team with the results of her investigations: "I thought I'd let you know that one hundred trillion Zimbabwe dollars is worth about 40 cents NZD, and that's only if you convert the old ZWD to the new ZWD (conversion rate 1 trillion to one) and then exchange those dollars for your NZD dollars." Did she strike the jackpot or what??


2 comments:

~JarieLyn~ said...

40 cents, now that takes the cake. Cool looking bill. It sounds like you had a good time last night.

Alli said...

Haha, 40 cents?? That's still cool though! I mean.... just saying ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS is fun.