Friday, August 04, 2006

Mailing money to Iraq.

Every now and then C2 will mail me a check for a couple thousand dollars along with instructions-- cash the check into $100.00 bills. Not $20.00's. They have to be $100.00 bills. Then I'm to take the money, place it in the pages of a magazine and mail the magazine to him via regular mail.

I'm not sure of the legality of this. I don't think anything is wrong, but at the same time it feels weird. He uses the cash to buy things in Iraq saying that Iraqis don't take cheque or credit card and that the dinar is so untrusted that you can get much better deals using $100.00 bills.

Usually it only takes a week for my magazine to get to Iraq.

This last time, I mailed the magazine at the end of June. By mid July the magainze still hadn't arrived. We were both feeling nervous. Did someone steal it? Was C2 out two thousand dollars? Did I write the wrong address on the envelope? It makes you feel ill. Our emails began with "Did you get it yet?" or "It's not here yet. Are you sure it was mailed correctly?" Unintentionally we emailing each other less often.

Today, thankfully, more than a month later, the magazine arrived. I'm not sure I'll do this for him again.

C2 is fond of discussing hypothetical how-much-of-a-friend-are-you questions. Things like "Would you give me a kidney if I needed it?" or "If my car broke down 100 miles away, would you pick me up? How about 500 or 1000 miles?" I think he has a new question... "What would you do if you mailed me some cash and the envelope never arrived?" What if it was $20.00? Or $100.00? Or $1000.00?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd drop him as a friend. He is using you. This is not the kind of thing any friend should be asked to do. Thats a lot of money and it can easliy get lossed and you will be blamed for it.

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