Category: mission

1919 Cover of The Natural Economic Order

Discovery of Interest-Free Money

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In September 2008, the banking crisis was getting out of hand. Things were falling apart. It seemed as if the financial system could collapse at any moment and that civilisation, as we know it, would end. Today, the 2008 financial crisis is a distant memory, but at the time, not only did the financial press worry. Panic was setting in. It was like 1929. I had long feared an apocalyptic financial collapse and believed that usury, or charging interest on money and debts, would be the underlying cause. On the surface, the cause may appear irresponsible lending, but interest is a reward for the risk of default. Without interest charges on debts, there would be no irresponsible lending.

The events prompted me to watch the animated picture ‘Money as Debt’ on YouTube and reflect once again on Silvio Gesell’s ideas about charging a holding fee on money and using it to eliminate interest charges. I penned down my thoughts about interest-free money with a holding fee, and tried to make an ordered, coherent whole of them. The idea had never seemed workable. Why should you lend out money interest-free if you can receive interest elsewhere? It is why economists didn’t look into it more seriously and why interest-free money remained a fringe idea, mainly attracting eccentrics like me.

Then, in the first days of October, I made a startling discovery. Banning interest promotes financial stability by preventing usurious lending, irresponsible lending, and unproductive financial schemes. That would improve the economy. Think of it like so. When credit card debt and payday lending at high interest rates disappear, people will have more disposable income, and you will have no usurers living off the work of others. That would be more efficient. It also reduces the need for government and central bank interventions to manage the interest-bearing debt. Usury requires government deficits and the creation of money by central banks.

That is because most of our money is debt. If you go to a bank and take out a loan, the bank creates money out of thin air, but you must pay back the loan with interest. You repay the loan with money borrowed by someone else. And the money you need to pay the interest doesn’t exist. Someone else must borrow that as well. On a larger scale, due to interest charges, we need to add extra debt to pay off existing debts with interest. To prevent the usury scheme from collapsing, governments run deficits and central banks print money, which leads to inflation. The inflation rate is often higher than the interest rate you get on a bank account. The profits are for the bankers, who receive huge bonuses.

Now comes the explosive discovery. The economy would do better without usury. If the economy performs better, the yield on investments would be higher, so an investor would receive better returns with negative interest rates. The difference comes from inflation. Without interest charges, there is no need for government deficits and money printing. The economy can thrive without more debt, so there would be no inflation. During the Great Depression, the Austrian town of Wörgl issued a currency with a holding fee. Those holding the money had to pay a 1% monthly fee to keep the money valid, so they would spend it rather than save it. And so, the money kept circulating, and Wörgl’s economy boomed while Austria suffered from the depression.

And so I figured that if the money is interest-free, the currency’s value rises more than the interest you would receive on an interest-bearing currency. Think of it like so. You can have 2% interest with 5% inflation or -2% interest with 0% inflation. The latter would be a better deal. The question then becomes, why lend out money with interest when interest-free money offers better returns? If the idea is that good, and the ‘Miracle of Wörgl’ suggests so, investors would bring their money to the interest-free economy, and the usury economy would collapse. If this became more widely known, the idea would spread and terminate the usury financial system forever.

Until then, I had always believed that interest-free money was sound in theory, but impossible in reality, because rather than good intentions, efficiency drives changes in this world, which is also the reason why we are doomed. The only constant in history is the strong killing the weak. But this money could be the terminator of usury, and a better future for humankind suddenly seemed possible. An incredible power seemed to lurk behind it. And making this knowledge public, I speculated, could unleash an unspeakable force. The Austrian central bank banned the Wörgl money, so we don’t know how it would have ended if it had continued. Perhaps, we would have lived in an entirely different world. A similar type of money lasted for over a thousand years in ancient Egypt. Had I discovered the secret that explains these successes?

That gave me serious doubts. How could the experts have missed it? I was an amateur. And amateurs who think they know better than the experts have become a plague recently. ‘Think for yourself and do your own research,’ has become the motto of a growing squad of nutters that the Dutch would call Wappies. ‘If it snows, that proves climate change is a hoax.’ You know the type. Everyone can gather random posts and articles from the Internet and create their own version of the truth out of thin air. I was anxious about getting it wrong, which made me doubt the greatness of the discovery. It might be a good idea, but it can’t be that good. And that is correct, a decade of research later confirmed, but it is possible nonetheless. And the proof also came as we have seen negative interest rates in the next decade.

Then, on a website promoting Gesell’s ideas, I found the following quotes,

‘The creation of money that cannot be hoarded will lead to a different and more real kind of property.’

– Albert Einstein

‘Gesell’s name will be a leading name in history once it has been disentangled.’

– H.G. Wells

‘The application of Gesell’s principle of circulation of money will lead the nation out of the depression within two to three weeks. I am a humble student of this German-Argentine businessman.’

– Irving Fisher

‘The future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx.’

– John Maynard Keynes

‘Gesell’s work will initiate a new epoch in the history of mankind.’

– Prof. Dr. B. Uhlemayr

‘Gesell’s discoveries and proposals are of the greatest importance for centuries to come.’

– Dr. Theophil Christen

These brilliant minds agreed that something epic lay beneath the surface and that it could change the future forever. John Maynard Keynes and Irving Fisher were among the greatest economists of their time. If Keynes believed Gesell would make us forget Marx, I might have found out why. And so, the Miracle of Wörgl and the grain money in ancient Egypt may not have been freak accidents but a sign of something more. Ending usury, the scourge that had haunted humankind for thousands of years, seemed within reach. While considering the implications, the following song played on the radio,

Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends
Like my father’s come to pass
Twenty years have gone so fast
Wake me up when September ends

– Green Day, Wake me up when September ends

September had just ended. Silvio Gesell first proposed money with a holding fee in his book ‘Natural Economic Order,’ which he first published in German in 1916 as ‘Natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung.’ I figured that its abbreviation could be NWO, which stands for New World Order, not knowing that the German ‘Wirtschaftsordnung’ was, unlike in English and Dutch, one word. So, was my discovery meant to happen? Was it part of something bigger? These thoughts arose, ironically, because I didn’t see ‘Wirtschaftsordnung’ as a single word. It made me feel small and insignificant. Paranoia was creeping in.

What is less known, but definitely worth noting, is that the German Nazis also aimed to abolish interest and contemplated Gesell’s ideas. Gesell himself was not a Nazi, but a liberal and an internationalist. Adolf Hitler was more impressed by the ideas of Gottfried Feder, who had the same kind of moustache Hitler had. Feder had written ‘The Manifesto for the Abolition of Interest-Slavery’ around the same time Gesell wrote ‘The Natural Economic Order’ and proposed nationalising all banks and abolishing interest. Gesell argued for charging a holding fee on currency and not interfering with markets and banks.

I named the discovery Natural Money as a reference to the Natural Economic Order. Strange things began to happen. When I woke up at night, the clock always showed times like 2:22, 4:44 or 5:55, with no exception. That was creepy. Something seemed seriously off with reality. Then, my wife told me she was seeing those time prompts as well. Until then, I hadn’t told her that I was seeing them. Once you enter the Twilight Zone, it begins to affect you. Meaningful coincidences started to occur, making me open to suggestions. What happened around me and in the world seemed to interact with my thoughts. Even the covers and titles of the books in the bookshop at the train station in Leeuwarden radiated a sense of spookiness, with references to my situation. They call it synchronicity.

The animated picture Money as Debt started with a list of assassinated US Presidents who supposedly opposed the banking system, suggesting evil bankers were behind these assassinations, making me fear death under suspicious circumstances if Natural Money would get serious attention. Still, if a repetition of the miracle of Wörgl were to occur, the news would spread fast, and if it were that good, it would be impossible to stop. Killing me wouldn’t help. The Secret Service would be too late. Of course, I had worried far too much. I posted the idea on several message boards. Most people didn’t get it. I mailed the findings to 200 Dutch economic researchers. None of them was interested.

Natural Money had a more favourable reception on the message board of Opednews.com. It generated some discussion as some visitors saw the potential. Still, it didn’t lead to a further propagation of the idea. I also went to Strohalm’s office in Utrecht. They had been working on interest-free currencies for decades. The people of Strohalm received me politely, but they had other priorities. They had a promising project in Uruguay. Doubt crept in again. I didn’t know enough about monetary economics and the financial system to see whether it was an idea worth pursuing. And even if I was right, no one would listen, so I planned to give up and resume my life.

It was disappointing, but not as bad as being evicted from the dormitory by A* nineteen years earlier. To remind myself of that and make me feel better, I played the Sleepwalking album by Gerry Rafferty, the album I had come to associate with the events at the dormitory because of the lyrics of the first song, ‘Sleepwalking.’ And then I wondered whether A* had something to do with the discovery of Natural Money. Over the years, several incidents had occurred, suggesting that She was still interfering with my life. It didn’t take long before clues came up. There is a thin line between paranoia and psychosis. The lyrics of the fourth song of the album ‘On The Way’ were noteworthy,

Drifting along with the wind, telling yourself you can’t win
It’s over, and now we begin, oh yeah, we are on the way
…
Only one woman, one man, just doing the best that we can
There’s so much we don’t understand,
Oh yeah, but we’re on the way
Light shining down from the east,
bringing a love that won’t cease

– Gerry Raffery, On The Way

In my bed, I was imagining again. By giving up, I had just told myself I couldn’t win. Was this just the beginning? The beginning of what? What did I not understand? What was this love that won’t cease? Was my destiny connected with that of A*? I had loved Her in secret all that time, but never thought, or even hoped, that we could be together. The distinction between my make-believe world and reality, which had been there since I was a child, began to blur. The lyric wasn’t specific, so the suggestion came from me linking the album to the events in the dormitory. And I might still have ignored it if it weren’t for the fifth song,

People come and people go, friends, they disappear
There’s only one thing that I wanna know, tell me where do we go from here
Everybody’s on the make, everybody’s trying to get ahead
In a world like this, you just exist to feed the walking dead.
…
Lookin’ out on a world gone crazy, waitin’ for the fun to begin
The race is on, yeah, they’re gettin’ ready, Jesus, what a state we’re in
Meanwhile, down in my backyard, I’m sitting doing solitary
Now that I’ve milked the sacred cow, I just worry ’bout the military.
…
Get ready
Get ready

– Gerry Raffery, Sleepwalking

It is a strange lyric, and it made me think. Is the world about to go crazy, and is something about to start? We exist to feed the walking dead, which could be the defunct banking system, I reasoned. The phrase probably refers to what Karl Marx once wrote, ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ I didn’t know that, so I made up my own interpretation. The sacred cow made me think of Joseph explaining the Pharaoh’s dreams, which is also not so obvious. Now, the story originates from a holy book, and one of the Pharaoh’s dreams involved cows, so that was the connection. Joseph introduced the granaries in Egypt, the story goes. Grain stored in these granaries became the basis of the Egyptian grain money, which, like Natural Money, had a holding fee to cover the storage costs.

These are some incredible leaps of thought that you wouldn’t make if you aren’t psychotic, so by then, I had crossed that line. Sleepwalking was the only album Gerry Rafferty had recorded outside the United Kingdom, and it was in the Netherlands, where I was living at the time. That was not a coincidence, I supposed, and I was right about that at least as it turned out. I had grown open to suggestions. Natural Money could change the world, some of the most brilliant minds had agreed on, and it was something epic, and it had to do with A*. And so, I was well on my way towards the shadow world where I was about to meet A* again after nineteen years. That evening, I felt A * trying to do a mind melt with me, like the Vulcans do in Star Trek, once again. This time, I didn’t resist. And there She was, on the other side. It seemed like a telepathic connection. By then, it was 11 November 2008.

Latest revision: 25 September 2025

Featured image: 1919 Cover of The Natural Economic Order. Wikimedia Commons.

Before the Dawn of Reality

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It was March 2018. My wife, Ingrid, woke me up in the middle of the night. She said, ‘The bathroom door is locked, and our son Rob is sleeping in his bed.’ You could only lock the door from the inside, so that was strange. The lock requires force. It couldn’t close itself by accident. Ingrid feared a burglar might be hiding inside. I took a knife from the kitchen to unlock the door. Ingrid was standing behind me, holding a heavy object to smash into the head of the burglar. Only I never believed a burglar was hiding there. I had become too accustomed to God’s pranks to consider it might be something else. The unusual had become the new normal. Even the laws of physics had gone out the window a few times. And I was right. No burglar was hiding in the bathroom. Ingrid was baffled.

It was the last seriously peculiar incident in the Decade of Strangeness. The number of unusual events that have taken place is truly remarkable. Most occurred between 2008 and 2018. After that, strange events became rare. Ingrid and Rob also noticed the spooky incidents. Whenever something mysterious happened, we hummed the theme from Midsomer Murders, a British crime drama series. It radiated an atmosphere of mystery and eeriness, much like the theme of The Twilight Zone.

Candles had popped out from their stands, travelling eye-popping distances on several occasions, leaving Ingrid with the question, ‘Are there any ghosts out there doing this?’ And so, once Ingrid decided to test the supposed spooks dwelling in our house, by saying, ‘If you are here, pull this card from the refrigerator.’ A magnet attached the card to it. And then she waited. Nothing happened. However, the next day, the card was on the ground, at a noteworthy distance. Something had shaken the refrigerator. The toothpaste on top of it had also fallen. That is no proof of ghosts, but it is a remarkable coincidence.

If something happened that defies the laws of nature and we couldn’t think of a natural explanation, or was in other ways highly peculiar, thus a noteworthy coincidence, I just put up my Sneek accent, and said, ‘Het is gewoon behekst juh.’ It’s just haunted, man. In other words, nothing to worry about. Ingrid is not a logical thinker who understands science. Otherwise, she would have shared my logical conclusion that this world is not real. But if I said that, Ingrid rolled her eyes or became angry. And so, I made these jokes, or I would say, ‘There is more between heaven and Earth, Horatio.’ Ingrid wasn’t religious, so I couldn’t bring up God either, as another logical conclusion is that Someone created us.

Before the Autumn of 2008, I didn’t take notice. Something was slightly off, but I just accepted it without questioning my worldview. There had also been incidents suggesting A******* was interfering with my life from a distance, and some of them scared me, but there were too few to become suspicious. There was no reason to suspect a connection with the other incidents either. However, the events of the Autumn of 2008 made me take notice from then on. And there was no turning back. We live in a scripted reality, and God directs the script. Related remarkable coincidences are doubly strange. Something weird happens, and then something equally strange happens with a meaningful relation to the previous peculiar event. As the following example demonstrates, we usually don’t notice. As the Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff once said, ‘You only see it once you get it.’

At the office, our team, the Green Team, worked on twelve Java services. They all had names, which were acronyms like GAS, CIQR, CBBOX or OGWS. One was named KISS, and another was named CUS, which sounds like the Dutch word for kiss. On 27 January 2025, I completed a release for CUS, and the release number became 3.45.0, which I told the other team members. Someone else then said, ‘That is strange. I just released that same version 3.45.0 for KISS.’ Releasing two services with the same release number on the same day is remarkable already. But the names of the services made the coincidence truly astounding. I alerted the other team members and stressed the amount of planning that would have gone into making this happen if it were intentional. The others didn’t appreciate it as much. And I thought, ‘Welcome to the Matrix.’ Seconds later, another team, the Yellow Team, on the opposite side of the aisle, began discussing a matrix they had built inside one of their Java services, loudly enough for me to hear.

On 1 March 2006, my father had worked for forty years for his employer, Roelofs, a road constructor. His employer threw a party for that occasion, but an exceptional snowstorm blocked the roads. Several guests were unable to attend. People slept in their cars on roads blocked by snow. As far as I know, that didn’t even happen during the epic winter of 1979 when parked cars became covered in snow, but not while driving. But it was March by then, while we had a regular winter that year. In the Netherlands, the winters are mild. In hindsight, the roadblocks happening on the same day my father had a party, as he had worked forty years for a road construction company, is a noteworthy coincidence. Only, it didn’t suggest that anything out of the ordinary was afoot.

In 2006, Ingrid went to a psychic fair. A medium asked the audience, ‘Did someone drop a plate today?’ She had dropped a plate that morning. Then the medium continued, ‘I see trains and railroads.’ We live next to the railway station. She asked, ‘Does anyone recognise this?’ Ingrid remained silent. She didn’t want to go on stage. Then the medium said something Ingrid couldn’t relate to. After that, the medium said, ‘I see a sensitive boy who could benefit from swimming.’ Ingrid believed it referred to Rob. A year later, I started swimming to cope with repetitive strain injury, and have been doing so ever since.

In 2007, Ingrid’s mother had passed away during the night. In the morning, we didn’t know that yet. I woke up Rob because he had to go to school. After that, I closed the door of his room. A few minutes later, Rob couldn’t get out. The door lock malfunctioned. It was impossible to open it. I had to use an axe to free Rob. By then, it was too late for Rob to go to school as the school bus had already left. Then the phone rang. Rob’s grandmother had passed away. And so, Rob could come with us to see her lying body.

We then had to clean up Ingrid’s mother’s apartment. We brought most of her belongings to a second-hand shop. There was a lot of stuff, including a doll that had always been on her bed. A few months later, Ingrid returned to her mother’s apartment to fetch the mail of her late mother. A new tenant had moved in. That same doll, wearing the same clothes, sat on the bed in her mother’s bedroom again. A decade later, Ingrid returned, and the same woman still lived there, so Ingrid discussed the doll with her. And then the truth came out. It was not the same doll, but another one of the same type.

On 1 January 2008, an epic fog covered the Netherlands. It was the densest fog ever seen, enhanced by powder fumes from the fireworks. Car drivers couldn’t see the road before them. Pedestrians walked in front of cars to point the way. We were staying with my brother-in-law to celebrate the New Year. I didn’t dare drive back home, so we walked. At the end of 1988, I had walked through a dense fog, thinking it resembled the future’s visibility as I planned to look for a room in 1989. That was the year A******* crossed my path. That visibility of the future was similar in 2008, even though it didn’t cross my mind at the time, and A******* would again have something to do with it.

In January 2008, the lottery jackpots of the two major Dutch lotteries fell in my hometown of Sneek within two days.1 It is a small town, so it is not so likely to occur, but also not so unlikely that you would call it a miracle. But what was about to happen to me that year was a statistical miracle, probably less likely than winning the lottery jackpot twice.

In the summer of 2008, a good-looking woman sat by the side of the swimming pool. She was watching me. The following week, she was there again, watching me. It had been quite a while since a good-looking woman had shown interest in me. That gave me the good feeling of still being attractive, but I kept a distance. It went on for a few months. I wasn’t willing to cheat on Ingrid. And I had a family and a responsibility. It couldn’t go on, so one day, I walked out when she came in. She understood the hint and didn’t return. I then realised I would never become unfaithful to Ingrid. That was just weeks before I learned about my True Love, and also about my primary responsibility. Things were about to go wild.

She says, ‘Ooh, my storybook lover
You have underestimated my power, as you shortly will discover’

Paul Simon, She Moves On

Featured image: dense fog, somewhere in the Netherlands on 1 January 2008

1. Jackpot valt weer in geluksstad Sneek. Leeuwarder Courant (11 January 2008).

Perhaps You Can See The Irony of That

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We’re on a road to nowhere

After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a right-wing populist politician, Pim Fortuyn, gained popularity because traditional politicians had failed to address the growing unease of the Dutch about Muslim immigrants. Fortuyn promoted a messianic personality cult. He called himself the Son of the People of the Netherlands. About the leader the Netherlands needed, Fortuyn wrote in his book De Verweesde Samenleving (The Orphaned Society), ‘A leader of stature is Father and Mother in one. He dictates the law and watches over the cohesion in the herd. The skilful leader is the Biblical Good Shepherd.’ Fortuyn anticipated the coming of the Great Leader of the Netherlands as he wrote, ‘Towards a Father and a Mother, on the way to the Promised Land,’ and, ‘Let us prepare for his arrival so that we can receive him.’ He posed himself as a Messiah. That was a reason why I didn’t like him. Perhaps you can see the irony of that.

Fortuyn called Islam a backward religion and claimed Western civilisation was superior. Christians and Many Muslims hold on to a medieval worldview. Still, Islam opposes interest charges on money and debts, and I believed that interest was one of the grave threats to civilisation, so my views of Islam were more favourable. The secondary role of women in Islam is not something worth copying, but we could learn something from Islam nonetheless. Even more so, out-of-control technology might end human civilisation, either by some apocalyptic event or by altering humans so humans cease to exist. You can’t blame Islam for that. It is Western civilisation that has brought us to the apocalypse. And if you must choose between doom and women wearing headscarves and backward practices like honour killings, the choice is not that difficult. We are on a road to nowhere,

We’re on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Taking that ride to nowhere
We’ll take that ride
I’m feeling okay this morning
And you know
We’re on the road to paradise
Here we go, here we go

Talking Heads, Road To Nowhere

Ironically, the song says that the road leads to paradise. The West can take pride in that. Previous generations have worked very hard to get here. Everywhere Fortuyn went, there was chaos and conflict. He seemed to enjoy it. Perhaps establishment politicians didn’t like him because they feared he would undermine society by causing division and conflict. The Netherlands had a consensus-building tradition called the Polder model for over a century.

False Messiah

Fortuyn saw himself as the coming Great Leader of the Netherlands, but history took an unexpected turn. On 6 May 2002, a left-wing loner assassinated him. It was an event that shocked the Netherlands. ‘The bullet came from the left,’ Fortuyn’s supporters claimed. That might seem so at first glance, but exactly 911 days later, an Islamic fanatic murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. That is noteworthy because Fortuyn’s sudden popularity was closely linked to 9/11, while Theo van Gogh had just finished 06/05, a motion picture about the assassination of Fortuyn. Van Gogh was killed on 2 November 2004 (11/2 in American notation), while 112 is the European emergency services telephone number. That points to the hand of God. The Bible has warned us of false messiahs. I hope you can see the irony of that as well.

Jan-Peter Balkenende
Jan-Peter Balkenende

Fortuyn aspired to become Prime Minister. Instead, Jan-Peter Balkenende got that job. He looked like an apprentice from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry Potter became his nickname. And that was not a coincidence, as the Netherlands was in for a massive bout of magic. Captain Decker, a song by Boudewijn de Groot, has the following lines,

Captain Decker, Flying Dutchman,
climbs above the timeless
space machine you’re living in,
starts to turn you inside out,
he needs you to know
what he was really all about

Captain Decker, Boudewijn de Groot

The timeless space machine could refer to the place where God is living. A Dutchman may need God to know what he is about. The animation picture Kroamschudd’n in Mariaparochie of Herman Finkers dwells on the possibility of Christ being born in Twente. My birthplace is Eibergen, just over the border in Achterhoek. In the 1980s, there were plans to create an independent province of Twente that included Eibergen and Nijverdal. Finkers came from Almelo, like Ilse DeLange. DeLange’s fourth studio album, The Great Escape, plays a central role in God’s messages in pop music.

World peace

In December 2008, there were many strange incidents. One of them was that the candy vending machine delivered a message at my work. Often, I went there to fetch a Twix bar. This time, the machine malfunctioned and failed to produce a Twix. It repeatedly misfired. That had never happened before, and to my knowledge, no one else had trouble with the machine that day. After trying three different options, it finally worked after choosing option 22, a Nuts bar. That was nuts, even more so because 22 = 11 + 11.

It was about to get even nuttier. To me, 11:11 represents a strange coincidence that has two parts. The next day, I bought a bag of potato crisps from the same machine. This time, it worked fine, but after opening the bag, I found a small piece of paper with the crisps. It was a temporary tattoo with the following Chinese text:

世界和平

A colleague knew a Chinese man who translated it for me. The characters stand for world peace. No one else did get a temporary tattoo with a bag of crisps. It was a production glitch. The paper had slipped into the bag, perhaps from another product line, and this bag happened to end up in my hands. Remarkably, my colleague Ronald Oorlog was absent that day. He had fallen ill. His last name, Oorlog, is the Dutch word for war. Now, that is a funny coincidence. Another colleague, Rene H, joked about the text, saying, ‘World peace is what Miss World would say she wanted after winning the prize.’

Linking it to Sneek

A nursing home in Sneek is named Nij Nazareth (New Nazareth). It might indicate that the Second Coming comes from this particular town, which was, by some miraculous accident, also my town of residence. To rule out it was a regular occurrence that would make the coincidence less impressive, I googled for buildings with similar names in other places, but nothing came up. Perhaps I was making too much of this coincidence. In the song Het Sneker Café, the unrivalled poet of the Dutch language, Drs. P, mocks the making of outlandish connections to a pub in Sneek,

There once was a girl of seventeen years of age,
the only child of a wine merchant,
who sought shelter in the Jura,
because she was lost on a trip.
She found an unoccupied house at the edge of the forest,
and felt from the outset that this is not right.
She took a glance at the window and what appeared:
Inside was the skeleton of a salesman in toiletries,
who had been missing for years
and had once stayed with his uncle and aunt in Bordeaux when he was young.
And there, they had almost exactly the same type of lampshades
as a small pub in Sneek.

Drs. P, Sneker café

That is scary indeed. The song reveals a few more equally sinister connections and concludes,

You see now how the pub again and again
affects the social interaction.
How here and there, and yes, even overseas
one stumbles upon this pub from Sneek.
It’s inexplicable and almost occult,
something that fills the world with trepidation.

Drs. P, Sneker café

Pope end times prophecy

In early 2013, an Australian poster on the message board godlikeproductions.com claimed he had been seeing 112 coming up in the media unusually often. He started a thread named 112 Keeps Coming Up In The Media. Other posters joined in with their selective bias, and they found a lot of 112 popping up in the media. It is the European Emergency Services telephone number, while I had lived in room 112 on that fateful dormitory, so the thread attracted my attention. The discussion remained active for several weeks. During that time, Pope Benedict XVI suddenly resigned on 11 February 2013, a highly unusual move. He was the first pope to step down in almost 600 years.

That became excellent material for this thread. 11 February is also the 112 European Day to celebrate the emergency services telephone number. 11 February is 11/2 in European notation, and 112 is the European emergency services telephone number, so that is why. You must admit that the European bureaucrats have found a most peculiar occasion to throw a party. In any case, the Pope’s resignation came unexpectedly, like a bolt from the blue. And lightning struck the Vatican a few hours after the Pope had resigned. It made several people wonder, so the thread came back alive.

Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation on 112 European Day is also noteworthy because of the 112th Pope End Times Prophecy attributed to Saint Malachy. The prophecy alleges 112 popes would reign, starting with Celestine II, until the End of Times. Benedict XVI was the 111th Pope. His resignation prepared for the arrival of the 112th Pope, who supposedly would be the last Pope before the End of Times and Jesus’ return. It made me curious, so I investigated the matter and discovered Saint Malachy had died on 2 November (11/2 American notation) 1148 and added that to the thread. My psychosis occurred in 2008, and if its message is correct, that prophecy is remarkably close. The same holds for Finkers’ animated picture of Christ being born in Twente. Likewise, my superstorm prediction was too accurate to be a coincidence, yet it was not precise. These prophecies tend to be somewhat off the mark for some reason. Perhaps you can see the irony of that as well.

Der Untergang der Titanic. Willy Stöwer (1912)

Harbinger of Things to Come

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In 2006 or 2007, a software upgrade of the disk controllers on the principal systems went wrong. For a week, they were out of operation. It was one of the biggest crises in the history of the government office, and perhaps the biggest of all. At the time, Kees and I were working on the systems renewal project at another location. The other database administrators dealt with the issue, as did many others. I knew there was a serious problem as we received regular updates by email, but I didn’t realise how serious it was. After a week, the telephone rang at home. It was 9 PM. My wife, Ingrid, took up the phone. It was the IT director. He said there was an emergency and asked me to come to the office. His voice reflected fear. ‘As if the Titanic had hit the iceberg,’ Ingrid later noted.

I hurried to the office and arrived by 9:30 PM. Many people were still in. It was a massive crisis. There was an atmosphere of fear. The database administrator on duty, Dirk-Jan, brought me up to speed. I searched the database log files, found the error messages, and typed them into the Google search bar. In this way, I found a document on the Internet with the remedy. I then repaired the failures and brought the systems online one by one. Board members and senior managers were standing around me, watching me type. Solving the issue wasn’t complicated, but few people used Google to find the answer at the time.

I learned that the last backup was over a week old, and the mirror copy was offline. You may know what backups are and why you might need them, but you may not know what a mirror copy is. A mirror copy is a safety measure. If you own a computer or a mobile phone, it contains data. That data is on a device. In the early 2000s, it was usually a hard disk. If that disk fails, your data may be gone forever. If you lose some photographs of your late cat, you might feel sad about it, but after a few years, you get over it, perhaps after consulting your psychiatrist and taking a lot of pills.

Corporations can’t afford to lose their data. That would bankrupt them. Their business is their data. Without it, they are out of business. If you have a backup, only the data from after the latest backup may be lost, but that can still kill you, most notably if you haven’t made a backup for a week. We were a government agency, so it wouldn’t have bankrupted us, but it would have been a national political scandal.

Corporate computers have multiple data storage groups in different locations. If one group catches fire or stops operating because of a failed software upgrade, the other groups still have the data. These groups are called mirror copies. We had two groups: the original and the mirror. You can imagine my bewilderment. We had no backup, and the copy wasn’t available. So much had gone wrong that it was a miracle that I succeeded in recovering all the data. But having no mirror and no backup meant we were still on the brink.

An even greater surprise was yet to come. The managers and the board wanted to return to business as usual and run the backlog of batch jobs. Then I said, ‘This is perhaps the most important advice I will ever give in my entire career. Don’t start the batch jobs yet. We are on the proverbial edge of the precipice. Running the jobs might just push us over. Everything went wrong for a week and there is no guarantee whatsoever that it will be all right now. We should bring the mirror copy back online and make a backup first.’

They planned to ignore my advice. Bringing the mirror copy back online and taking a backup would take eighteen hours of precious time. It was a lot of data to back up, as it was everything we had. I was a low-ranking official while the IT director had claimed there was nothing to worry about. But he had left the building. I kept stressing that making a backup was the right thing to do. ‘If something goes wrong that could finish us,’ I told them. It was the worst crisis ever. And so, I pressed for an extensive check-up to see if everything was in order. On that, they could agree.

During the check-up, I found another failure that everyone had overlooked. That scared the managers and the board, prompting them to start another meeting. And then they followed my advice. The IT director was no longer there, and they faced a determined saviour who told them in no uncertain terms that they were about to do something stupid. The operators brought the mirror copy online and made a backup before we resumed normal operations. In this way, rational decision-making prevailed. Nothing went wrong anymore, but no one could have known that beforehand.

If it had gone wrong, the agency probably would have survived. Operations would likely have had to stop for several weeks—that had already happened for a week—and it may have been impossible to recover all the data. That would have made the headlines. But it never came to that. When the journalists of the local newspaper smelled a rat, the board could tell these journalists that the situation was under control and that the data was safe. My wife’s comparison of this situation with the Titanic having hit the iceberg was not entirely apt. Saving the Titanic once it had hit the iceberg was technically impossible. It would have required a miracle. What I did may have appeared to be a miracle, but it was technically possible.

The audit department later evaluated the crisis. The auditors noted that after a week of failures, all the problems suddenly vanished, which they found already hard to believe. What they found even more difficult to fathom, and they stressed the inconceivability of it during a meeting, was that after a week of irrational decision-making, sanity suddenly took hold as we had brought the mirror copy back online and made a backup. They couldn’t figure out why that happened. Our management had kept them entirely in the dark. I didn’t enlighten them either, as it would make our management and board appear incompetent.

My manager, Geert, complimented me for handling the situation. He stressed that my colleagues had been content with me. ‘I was a pleasant colleague,’ he added. Strangely enough, Geert didn’t say something like, ‘Your contribution was critical in saving us from a disaster.’ It reveals something about Geert’s thinking. To him, it was teamwork. Geert wasn’t present that evening, so he may not have learned the details of what transpired. And so, it didn’t help my career. A few years later, the other senior database administrators received a higher salary grade, but I did not. Geert was involved in that decision.

When the office was on the brink, I knew what to do and was determined not to let the ship sink. Our management and the board were clueless and had lost it. Fear gripped them, making them listen to reason. Now it seems that my dealing with the crisis could be a harbinger of things to come.

Latest revision: 4 August 2025

Featured image: Der Untergang der Titanic. Willy Stöwer (1912). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Grapevine snail. Jürgen Schoner.

Learning Opportunities

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In 2005, our government office embarked upon an ambitious systems renewal project. The IT director aimed to make a mark by replacing our existing IT systems with a brand new solution. As the story goes, the IT director had visited Oracle headquarters near San Francisco. He could get a steep discount on the Oracle ERP solution. I wasn’t a firsthand witness, but several colleagues gave similar accounts. And so, it could be the truth. ERP can administer an entire business. It is a total-for-everything solution, but only if you model your business the way ERP prescribes. In other words, every department must change how it conducts its affairs. It is like a straitjacket. That makes ERP awkward to use.

It wasn’t a good idea to purchase an enterprise solution without first considering whether you need it. But instead of the IT director admitting he had bought the ERP on a whim and writing off the license fee, which would have been a minor loss of a few hundred thousand euros, perhaps, he sought to justify the purchase. Possibly, the IT director wanted to save face, but you wouldn’t expect that kind of vanity from a devout Christian like him. He hired business consultants to assess the quality of our IT systems and write a report to propose a solution. Unsurprisingly, the report stated that our systems were obsolete and that we should switch to Oracle ERP, as that would save us a lot of money. And now I spill some beans. These outdated systems were still doing fine fifteen years later.

A strategic information planning phase preceded the project. Cap Gemini business consultants organised brown paper sessions where employees could help identify the business requirements. It was different from what I had learned as a student. I had a good grade, but as a student, I was naive and believed good grades mattered. We had to list our components by writing them on brown paper and sticking them to the wall. The consultants would then call their services. I wrote the word database on brown paper and stuck it to the wall, and the Cap Gemini business consultant concluded that we needed a database service. That didn’t seem like a proper strategic business analysis to me. Anyone could paste the word service behind the name of a component. It dawned upon me that it might not end well. Cap Gemini charged over €150 per hour for their consultants, who dressed in suits, leading managers to believe they possess strategic information planning expertise.

There were political troubles early on. A Cap Gemini project leader left because she didn’t share the vision of the IT director. He surrounded himself with yes-men. In the Information Planning course at the university, we learned that you must first define the business requirements and then select a solution based on these requirements. It can save you a lot of trouble. The business consultants did the opposite as they tried to justify a choice already made. Over time, it grew into an all-encompassing megalomanic plan. Most departments didn’t want to have the IT department dictate their operations. And so, the consultants planned to supplement the Oracle ERP with several special-purpose modules. Making special-purpose software would render ERP pointless, as the whole point of using ERP was to avoid building such software.

We didn’t dive into the deep end without first testing the waters, so we initiated a pilot project to develop a basic system using ERP. It was a brand new system to administer Plukze, a law that allowed the government to confiscate the assets of criminals. Plukze was a straightforward bookkeeping system, and ERP can keep books well, so the pilot succeeded. It was like sending a rocket into the sky and then, after a successful test, deciding to put a man on the Moon. That is an entirely different ballgame.

I received training to become an administrator of the system. I made a mistake by putting a database index on maintenance while the ERP system was running. The ERP proved to be more sensitive to regular database maintenance than the Designer/2000 systems, and the ERP began to malfunction. I mentioned my index maintenance as a likely cause. We restarted the system, which resolved the issue. I remarked that I hadn’t anticipated the problem as regular systems could handle such a simple operation, which implied criticism of the new system. For all kinds of simple actions, the ERP had lengthy instruction sets that you could find on the Oracle support website.

You couldn’t simply reorganise an index or do other database maintenance while the system was running. I had yet to learn that. The environment was politically sensitive because the IT director’s pet project was at stake, so many were on edge. The project leader, likely fearing for his career, complained about me to higher management, labelling me unfit. And so, they took me off the project. Fear was in the air. A circulating story was that the IT director threatened a manager in the elevator who had openly disagreed with him during a meeting. I was open about my mistakes and views, and that didn’t help me.

After the pilot proved a success, the enterprise systems renewal project took off. Once it had started, Oracle began to determine its direction. Oracle consultants soon found that we needed additional solutions from Oracle and, of course, the latest technology. Some of these technologies were still in the marketing phase and had not yet proven to work. Our decision-makers, the architects and managers, agreed. So when the special-purpose software proved cumbersome and inadequate, they tried new ideas, such as using BPEL, a business process model language, on top of ERP. This way, the business model could be tailor-made while still using ERP, or so they promised.

No one had done that before, and for good reasons, as it turned out, so even Captain Kirk wouldn’t have gone there. The other consultants, hence those who were not from Oracle, were there to make money for their employers by making the customers happy, so they tried the idea. And if you are critical, you will undoubtedly be first in line for the course Professional Skills. I am a special case. Despite working in information technology, I am not keen on using unnecessary new technologies and try to live without them. And so, I had no smartphone until 2020. By then, functioning in society without one had become practically impossible.

The pointlessness of the project began to demoralise me. Goals were constantly changing as ideas were always failing. IT employees became stretched to their limits for years in a row. Software releases that took one person and a few minutes with Designer/2000 took hours or even days, and required a dozen specialists working according to a script of up to fifty steps. Working late or on weekends became a regular affair, including ordering pizza, Chinese, or other food, as you can’t bring down the system for so long during office hours. The database administrators bore the brunt of the pressure as the job role expanded to everything related to Oracle. Everything we did was Oracle, so database administration became the focal point for all the advanced stuff. And that began to take its toll, and I started to suffer from stress and repetitive strain injury.

My colleague Kees, the tech genius, was kind and helpful. You could call him at home, and he would help you. One evening, before the system renewal project had started, I once feared I had messed up a vital database during a maintenance operation. I called him at home. He came over and helped me check it. But Kees was too helpful. He enthusiastically jumped on every crazy plan our management devised. He was an innovator and loved new technologies, which made him the management’s darling. I lagged behind Kees, but the other database administrators couldn’t keep up at all. It was like having a Trojan horse inside our department as the project pushed more and more unmanageable technology into the department. Kees didn’t look after the department’s interests but the project’s. The things he invented and built had to be kept up and running by the others. Kees didn’t make a lot of notes, but was always willing to help us. Indeed, the entire systems renewal project might have collapsed had Kees gone missing.

Our managers had no clue what they were doing and believed more advanced technology like Oracle RAC clusters would fix things, but that only aggravated our troubles. RAC was pointless, required additional knowledge, and was still prone to failures, even though much less than previously, as the technology had matured and the new systems were on Unix. And so, I would sometimes sarcastically note, ‘The most reliable RAC cluster is one with one machine.’ That was the same as not having RAC at all. Pesky problems piled up on my desk. I constantly had to learn new skills. Project leaders pressured me to work on plans that were bound to fail. That couldn’t go on. I wanted to help people, but it was better not to fix other people’s problems or work on ideas that would fail. People were creating problems at a much faster pace than I could fix them. There was too much work, and most of it was pointless.

The escalating stress compelled me to make radical changes, focusing on the most critical issues while avoiding those that were pointless or doomed to fail. Whenever multiple project leaders pressured me, I referred them to my manager, saying, ‘He should set the priorities.’ Whenever a colleague tried to bequeath his pesky problem to me, I explained how he could fix it himself. ‘It begins with using Google,’ I said repeatedly. At the time, not everyone used search engines. Many still relied on their knowledge, manuals, and support from Oracle. Google has helped me solve more issues at a faster pace. Often, someone else has had the same problem and posted the solution on the Internet. But if you solve more problems, you get even more. It was a learning opportunity. If you solve other people’s problems, they stop thinking for themselves. I had to stop doing that.

As things spiralled out of control, our management decided we needed more qualified database administrators. Our salaries were too low to attract the right people, so they gave the new hires and Kees a higher salary grade while leaving me out. They also increased the number of temporary positions. The headcount went from four to fourteen database administrators. And still, we couldn’t handle the workload. Kees was a brilliant technician, and despite that, or perhaps partly because of that, things went downhill.

Kees was quicker on the job than I, except on one notable occasion when a system administrator had wiped out a disk on which several crucial databases resided. It caused a crisis, prompting all the database administrators to scramble and restore the data, bringing the systems back online. I was the first to develop a working procedure for restoring databases and getting them back online, which the others then used. It doesn’t seem a mere coincidence. It was the third major crisis that the database administrators had to fix.

Temporary hires came and went. One of them was Ronald Oorlog. His last name means war, and he was ill when the World Peace temporary tattoo from the candy vending machine ended up in my hands. Rene H was the one who often joked about a master copy of the ERP system containing the settings, quoting a line from The Lord of the Rings, ‘Master precious… master precious…’ Another, Chris, told me he had met Jesus in his effort to evangelise me. He said it as if he had encountered Jesus in person, as if Jesus had walked around and he ran into him. In hindsight, it was a noteworthy coincidence.

As things spiralled out of control, our management decided we needed more qualified database administrators. Our salaries were too low to attract the right people, so they gave the new hires and Kees a higher salary grade while leaving me out. They also increased the number of temporary positions. The headcount went from four to fourteen database administrators. And still, we couldn’t handle the workload.

Yet another colleague, database administrator Raoul, had roots in the former Dutch colony, Suriname. He once made a surprisingly frank statement. He worked for his uncle, he told me, who also came from Suriname. Apart from him, his uncle only hired native Dutch. ‘That is because the Dutch are more reliable,’ he added, ‘They do the job as agreed. You don’t have to check on them.’ I supposed it was true. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have said it. Surinamese don’t take life as seriously as the Dutch. The Dutch might call the Surnamese relaxed or even lazy, as many of them seem to think that you can do tomorrow what you failed to do today. Don’t read this as only criticism. After all, doing nothing is better than doing something stupid.

The year 2008 neared its end, and things took an unexpected turn. God seemed to have a message for me. Long-lasting stress can cause psychosis, so here is the probable cause. My perspective on what mattered changed profoundly. The job became a sideshow, and most of what we did at work was pointless. It was time to set the right priorities, cut my working hours and work on the project I gradually came to name ‘The Plan For the Future.’ Despite that, my performance at the job remained acceptable. We had so many database administrators that database administration became a separate department headed by a manager who knew the job because he had been a database administrator previously.

This manager held me in high regard because I tried to control the workload by focusing on what mattered and trying to halt foolish plans. In 2011, he called me an example for all the others in front of all the others. He shared my view that Kees acted like a Trojan horse, causing trouble to the database administration department. Even fourteen database administrators couldn’t handle the workload, indicating that something was seriously wrong. Still, Kees was only a facilitator, not the culprit, because it was the IT director’s pet project, and our systems architects let Oracle drive the agenda. The focus was on new technologies rather than building a functional system. Everyone else went along with it, so sometimes it felt like being the only rational person in an insane environment.

After several years and spending over 100 million euros, the new system finally went into operation. That brand new system, which had cost so much effort, only accepted incoming messages and acknowledged their reception. Over a hundred people had worked on it for years. An experienced programmer might build a programme capable of doing only that in one day. It was a bloated set of software and machines with the latest technology, including RAC databases, but it was capable of nothing. The IT director had organised a party in which he proudly announced that we finally had a system made ‘under architecture.’ By phrasing it that way, he made it seem as if architecture was the project’s main objective. It made me think that our architects were incompetent. Those I saw in meetings didn’t debunk that impression as they spoke vaguely and made simple things appear complicated. It would take me years to nuance that prejudice.

Again, as the story goes, our board then made a politically brilliant move by selling the project as a success to the government in The Hague, arguing that after spending more than 100 million euros, they needed a few million more to fix the remaining bugs. It worked. Appearance can go a long way to hide the facts. The board used that money to hire a software company to rebuild everything in Java in nine months. From then on, the ERP only did the financial administration, but they made it appear that the new Java software was just an add-on to the ERP. The budget was tight. There was no money for testing and fixing bugs.

Unsurprisingly, the new Java systems crashed nearly every day, and the problem lists grew so long that no one could keep track of them. The Java systems consumed a lot of resources and generated a lot of data, such as millions of messages that no one dared to discard. Perhaps, you could use them to find out what went wrong. And so much went wrong. These systems were dreadful, not only for us but also for those who used them. They split up the database administrator department into Oracle Designer 2000, called legacy, the ERP and Java systems, called Enterprise Architecture, and new developments. We had a say and could give our preferences. I didn’t want to work with the problem systems of Enterprise Architecture, but I ended up in that horror show together with Sico, as no one else wanted to. Sico was our ERP specialist, and I was one of the few with ERP knowledge, so I was doomed beforehand.

Over the years, I had grown cynical about everything our board and management were doing. During the crisis and the strategic information planning phase, they had proven to be a bunch of clueless clowns. The systems renewal project confirmed that impression. Only one project succeeded in those years, building an old-fashioned Designer/2000 system. Had we made the other systems using Designer/2000 or its successor tool APEX from the start, it might have cost less than 5%, and it would have succeeded. But then again, that was old technology, so it had no future. And so, I didn’t foresee at the time that Java would turn out to be the right choice.

The new Java systems used a hundred times as much memory and disk space as the Designer/2000 systems for doing the same job. That was an understatement. Making a fair comparison was difficult. The outcome of my calculation was 3,000 to 16,000 times as much. However, the new systems initially processed low volumes of transactions and would scale up. Our architects didn’t see resource consumption as an issue. The price of memory and disks went down over time. Cheap resources make us wasteful, and you can see that everywhere around you. We can do without over 99.99% of the data we store.

Unsurprisingly, the data storage became overburdened. We were too far ahead of our time. The IT director then fired the manager responsible for data storage, citing that corporations like Google and Facebook can scale up quickly. Only, we weren’t Google, but an insignificant government agency with a few hundred IT employees. I was on leave when it happened. I learned about it the following Monday and thought, ‘The IT director is responsible for the mess. He is the one who should be fired.’ A few hours later, a soccer club, VVV from Venlo, fired its trainer, who had the same first and last name as our IT director.1 Now that is a remarkable coincidence.

The failed systems renewal project became a learning experience. The government in The Hague had smelled the rat and had sent someone to oversee the CJIB and reorganise it. The IT director had to go. Geert replaced him. He was the manager who had promised to restore my confidence in my employer, but left me out for the promotion that the other senior database administrators received. Geert didn’t have a bureaucratic mindset. Rather than depending on procedures, he gave us responsibility and confidence.

We began working in smaller teams, handling a few systems owned by a single department. As a side benefit, there was less hassling between business units competing for resources. And we began working in smaller steps. That makes software development manageable. This way of working is agile. The symbol of agile is a snail. You know, as agile as a snail. Just kidding. Twenty years earlier, the insurer FBTO had already organised its IT department in a similar fashion, which worked well.

Leadership does make a difference. The IT department got its act together under Geert’s leadership. In 2025, many other government offices have yet to catch up. Bureaucratic rules still make our work harder than it needs to be, but today, they aren’t an excuse for evading your responsibilities. And so, this story comes with a few learning opportunities. First, without the right vision, you fail, no matter how hard you work. Second, you can’t change everything at once. You must have a long-term vision. Third, things hardly ever go according to plan. It is better to work in smaller steps towards your goals and make adjustments on the way. And you should give people confidence. We make mistakes. But if we do, we should learn from them to do better next time.

Latest revision: 2 August 2025

Featured image: Grapevine snail. Jürgen Schoner (2005). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

1. VVV-Venlo ontslaat trainer Van Dijk. Nu.nl (20-12-2010). [link]