There’s this article in which I could read some about
time’s perception. It wasn’t too deep but what I usually remember from it is
that we, –the almost forty in 2018- when saying something about the nineties,
tend to think it was about ten years ago. I hadn’t bought a DVD player yet. I
remember that a friend lent me two VHS tapes with the bands he could record
from a special broadcasting of Woodstock 99. I remember Limp Bizkit: the
nookie. Few years later Korn came to Venezuela, Papa Roach performed at that
show too. I was amazing, affordable, young and nearly ten years ago (in my head
at least). Moments and memories are always playing tricks, I can´t precise when
I stopped playing VHS tapes and replaced them with DVDs, for instance. I remember
those Coca-Cola concerts (Experiencia
Roja, they were called) as not so distant events. My wife gave me as a
present my first smartphone in 2013 (I’m not so into what’s on but that’s not
the point here) and nowadays I’m finding hard to see the daily routine without
it, even though I’ve been using it only for five years: it’s seems like forever
but it’s not. I’ve spent more time with mobiles of the other kind. So this tricky
is this perception issue…
Money, on the other hand, got tricky too. During the
first months of 2008 the Government ordered the first trick with money; from
then on, three units would be suppressed this way: what´s valued one hundred
fifty thousand bolívares changed into one hundred fifty; three zeros out. It
was called (bolívar fuerte) to make a difference from the former one and this
was, for real, ten years ago. It obviously created a new perception. Four years
later there was no distinguishing of one currency from another; there were both
bolívar and also by that now, the former bills were all out of circulation (they got out the same 2008 and this is
tricky too: nowadays there’s a strong shortage of bills) We simply got used
to say that a car costs forty thousand instead of forty millions, and if it’s
putted that way it did not sound so bad until you talked about salaries…
Venezuelans have been dealing with ‘Control Cambiario’
(this sort of ban from free market and
that’s a euphemism, because it is brutal) for over fifteen years. Fifteen
years of managing multiple exchange rates. This got crazy on 2015 (the first
time someone had to pay one hundred bolívares just for a dollar) but it didn’t
stop there, by October 2017 one dollar was fifty thousand bolívares, one
hundred thousand by November, two hundred thousand last January, just for a
dollar. That makes most of us handle salaries not higher that ten dollars per
month… and this situation brought us a refreshed trick: due to the astonishing
devaluation, people are suppressing, again, three zeros, this time on their
own; a nice but not so fancy meal costs five hundred in a restaurant, but it’s
not five hundred, it’s five hundred thousand and most of the people just make
over a million in thirty days, so, if you want to have a meal, just a meal out,
you know it will be almost half of a salary for some, and simply impossible for
many…
The government made time and money a matter of
perception in Venezuela. The most frequent tale people say to each other is
what you could do with certain amount of money and that’s certainly less and
less every day on… the perception is nostalgia.
