In the good old days of the peseta, the cheeky coin often punched well above its weight. To the newcomer to Spain the only worry was, that when spending large amounts of money, there would not be enough room on the cheque to write in all the required zeros.
Then along comes the all-singing, man-size euro and the expats breathe a sigh of relief. That is until they discover they didn't really want their bank to pay a standing order worth several thousand pounds each month for the supply of electricity to a one-bedroom apartment. The problem is one of orthographic inconsistency across our beloved union!
Brits are used to writing cheques for whole amounts of pounds –followed by a full-stop, after which we put in the two digits for our humble pence. If the cheque is for many thousands of pounds -and we want to make it absolutely clear that we are talking about sums that would ordinarily only be familiar to megastar footballers and recently ousted business executives, the UK and USA convention is to place a friendly comma to mark the divide between the millions and the thousands. That's clear enough isn't it?
Well yes, except that many continentals –institutions and common folk and all of our dear chums in sunny Spain do exactly the opposite! The confusion is often compounded by many Brit's misunderstanding over the Spanish word for thousand, "mil" – which to the uninitiated sounds like something much more serious. It pays to remember that if you really want to be a euro millionaire then you have to be reckoned in "milliones" –and check each line of your Spanish bank statement very carefully!
Submitted by John Butler