Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

Yes, good idea. When I like something, I make a comment to the author and once he responds to it, we take it from there. I'm annoyed with this, because I made myself a lier and all I've got is my word.

Communication methods exist other than email, and I don't mean twits, twittering. Telephone operators might give you his/her phone number, particularly if you have a physical address. Of course if you have his street address, City and State you can send a snail mail letter. The post office is still delivering bills, although I haven't gotten a letter in a long time. Christmas cards still arrive in my mail box in December. Do you have any friends in common who might know where/how to find him. The traditional methods were telephone, telegraph and tell a woman. You might hire a private detective or bill collector.

Somewhere I heard the theory everyone is connected by at most six degrees of separation. If you ask all your friends, and ask them to ask all their friends, likely you can get in touch that way.

Thank you all,
I found him, or rather, he sent me another email to address I've used to contact him in the first instance.
Cheers

Sorry SW.
you've lost me there with "happy ending". I sent the money and he'll buy a cup a tea. for all I know. That was a deal.

CW,
you need to start new genre, comedy, you've got a streak for it. We've got be able to laugh.
Cheers.

what else do we have but our word?

Old saying in finance: "Your word is your bond"; seems he cashed your bond in ;-)

Bananas come in bunches. Fools come in gaggles. Emphasis on the Gag. Or maybe packs, like playing cards, but with more Jokers.

so much bond and honesty from finance people in resent years! I wonder who have coined that phrase, it could not have been a banker!

It was a banker! When I started if you for example got divorced you were effectively banned from the City of London because you had breached your wedding vows. Any run in with the law - the same. I actually benefitted from that; a rich City businessman misused company funds, was discovered and fled to Paris and from there to Havana where he died a pauper. Someone asked round for funds to bring his body back to England and every member of his family refused to donate anything because of his disgrace. He was not a relative or known to me but some of the funds were used to give me an education.
It was only when the American banks opened up that they claimed that such conventions were not law so they could be ignored. It got to the stage where the Bank of England knew certain bank directors were crooks but did not have sufficient evidence to definitely win a case in the courts so such people started running banks.

Sounds like the deal with sub-prime mortgages - - that was a disaster waiting to happen from day one.

Caveat Emptor (buyer beware). Of course it was stupid but I suspect it was a case of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours". It was one of my jobs to assess all risks before they were taken and we were (unsuccessfully) pressured to take that sort of deal. The market hated anyone not being caught when someone sneezed; I got hell for taking cash security weeks before the biggest bank in an EU country went belly up and it got very political in the US.

I was working on Wall Street when they were inventing new securities. Since I could follow the math, and wrote the code to track the securities, I understood the securities being traded more than most of the traders buying and selling them.

I worked in the City of London and understand you perfectly. It was suggested that there might be as many as five people in the City who actually understood some of those products. I remember one deal - the documents were about 7 or 8 inches high; I spent an entire weekend at home working out the various permutations of how just one A4 page of legalese should be interpreted. Generally those things were a nightmare to try to interpret and there were normally multiple possible interpretations for me to reject and send back.