Have you heard that  “In Wellington, nobody will chase a hat if it gets blown off? Because there will be another one following it.”  

A friend of mine wanted to get a repair job done on his house. When he called for quotations, the first man wanted $ 15,000 and the second $ 12,000. As they varied widely, my friend called another one. As the third man quoted the lowest figure, $8,000 only, he got the contract. It was not like the Sinhala idiom “ ලාබ බඩුවෙ හිලක් ඇත”; the man did an excellent job.

As the payment had to be in cash, it involved a large bundle of notes—eighty notes of hundred dollar bills. When my friend gave the pile, the man accepted it without even counting. But when he was requested to count, he carefully counted the lot one by one.

It was a windy day there. The man gripped the bundle tightly and walked up to his double cab. All of a sudden 40 km/h blowing accelerated to a gale force. The man lost his balance, and the dollar bills got off and floated while some got wings and flew off. The onlookers tried their best to chase and catch them and pick them up. Somehow as they spread over a large area, the man would have lost a few thousand of dollars. That’s “Windy Wellington”.