The Longest Minute of my Life

In an age of electronic payments, when people’s wages are deposited directly into their bank accounts, it can sometimes be embarrassing if you arrive at the supermarket checkout and after swiping your debit card, read those two utterly terrifying words “Insufficient Funds”. I imagine that for a whole class of people, that never happens but when you live from paycheque to paycheque, those words are like daggers, piercing your very soul.

What happens though, if you read those words on a cash machine; on the other side of the world?
Sheer; abject horror.

More than a decade ago, I was on holiday in the UK and staying in the City of Liverpool. Even during what was supposedly an upturn in world economies, Liverpool still had an air of grime about it; with some shop fronts boarded up and sections of terrace houses long since abandoned.
Liverpool with a history of two proud football clubs, rock and roll royalty, two cathedrals and a rather famous statue (exceedingly rare), stood like a independent republic against the rest of the nation. Nothing worked properly in Liverpool but then, there was a sort of charm in that.
That charm did not extend to cash machines.

I had gone to the cash machine, expecting to pull out some money to go grocery shopping with and after what seemed like eons wheeling and passing; after computer networks dialled each other up over the expanse of half a world away, the cash machine could do nothing but return those two words of terror: “Insufficient Funds”.

I went inside the bank, hoping to speak to someone but because I was not a customer, they couldn’t really help me. After asking several kind strangers for some spare change to make a phone call, I called my bank back in Sydney who came back with a delightful recorded message informing me that there was no-one who could help me; that the office hours were nine to five, Eastern Standard Time. This was not helpful.
I had no answer. I had no-one in Sydney who either could or would give me an answer. The eternal question of “Why?” was now not only buring a hole in my mind but a hole in my wallet and a hole in my belly.

What do you do on the other side of the world and you can’t get an answer? Ask a policeman? What good would they do anyway?
It’s not really appropriate to get angry and yell to the heavens in the middle of a large city — people might think that you’re some sort of crazy person.

Sanity refused to reassert itself but weirdly, not even hopelessness made any sense either. Suddenly I realised that because nobody here knew who I was, I was in effect totally free. I didn’t have to meet anyone for three days and although I might not have any money to buy anything, it didn’t really matter either.
I spent most of the afternoon, on the bank of the Mersey, watching boats coming and going. I might not have been home but there suddenly wasn’t any reason why this place should not become home.

When you live through the longest minute of your life and you stare down the barrel of confusion and eternity, sometimes it fires a shot of possibility at you. Yoy realise then that life never has “Insufficient Funds” — it’s always drawing on funds to buy you new experience.