Tales from Crete | 73

I'm a big fan of doing weird calculations.

Most often it ends up in something that I can't use for anything, or for that matter makes sense, but a few times it brings something useful with it.

If you ask the question: "how far is it to Roskilde by bike on a sunny day" and then afterwards ask how far it is in rainy weather, it hardly makes any sense. The best I have come up with is that it depends on where you start from and which route you drive. But I haven't tested that theory and my much too old bike has a flat tire. It doesn't make a big difference either, because I never use it.

But as a young person, one day I figured out how much sugar I actually used in coffee in a year. So over the course of a week, I took exactly the same number of teaspoons of sugar and poured into a bowl as I put in the coffee. Then it was carefully weighed and multiplied by 52 weeks, where I subtracted a little to compensate for the summer months when I don't drink as much coffee as the rest of the year. The calculation was decisive for me, because the result was completely out of proportion. I consumed more than my own weight in sugar in a year, just from what I put in the coffee and then I immediately stopped using sugar in the coffee. So it was a useful calculation, you could say.

Now I have set myself up for another landmark calculation. Cigarettes will rise to DKK 55 on 1 April 2020, and since it IS already passed in Parliament, I don't really believe it's an April Fool's joke, even if the date suggests it. I smoke Camel Blue in soft packaging. Such a package costs DKK 39, so it will increase by DKK 16. That is an increase of 41%. It is purely a tax to the state and then you have to earn twice as much and pay tax on the income to be able to pay it.

But it's not that easy for me. I think I pay enough tax in advance, so I don't feel like it. I simply don't pay the extra DKK 16 per package.  It is an approach I learned in Crete. If you don't want to pay more in tax than you do, then you just have to take matters into your own hands, so that's what I'm doing.

I will simply stop smoking on April 1, 2020. Then the taxman will lose both the increased tax and the already high tax that is already on cigarettes, and then they can learn that they can.

Now some will probably think that it is also an April Fool's joke, but it is not. Because already on Saturday 1st March the campaign starts and my calculation is that if I just reduce my consumption by 1 cigarette a day, every day for the whole month of March I will smoke minus 12-15 cigarettes on 31st March. I'm not sure if I can send a bill to Tax on that account, but you can always try.

In any case, the taxman will not take me r…. on.

If you also have some strange calculations that you use from time to time, please share them with me, because I love this kind of little series of twos, and some of them actually lead to something, even if it sounds strange.

Kalo mine

Michael