You thought the world had stopped using land-line telephones years ago, right? You were wrong.
Like retired English couples, and migratory Godwits – it turns out they all just came to New Zealand to die.
Few moments in New Zealand life are more uncomfortable, than the arrival of the bill at the end of a group meal.
Kiwis are inherently programmed to try to make everything in life as ‘fair’ as possible. So the thought of simply dividing the tab, evenly, by the number of people present, fills the average Kiwi with the sort of confusion and terror normally reserved for an All Blacks v France Rugby World Cup match.
Which makes squaring up the tab in New Zealand, one of the most difficult, most convoluted group agreements to reach, since the David Bain jury. Both of them.
New Zealanders fall into one (occasionally two) of following three states of being; “Thinking about buying a house”, “Buying (then paying off) a house”, or “Trying the sell a house”. Anybody who doesn’t identify with at least one of these categories is probably either an asylum seeker, or a tourist.
New Zealand takes pride in being ‘the world’s guniea pig’. A micro-society, allegedly employed by the large (inverted commas) Corporations and/or Governments of the world to beta test new technologies, or political ideas, before they are released to much larger countries.
A common argument suggests that this is how New Zealand – an otherwise frontier outpost of technological retardation – developed the first near-cashless society, through the early introduction of Eftpos (Electronic Funds Transfer point… oh, you know what is without having to explain the acronym).