Across the miles

Ten years ago, Jacqui McKeand made a long-distance phone call to a Swiss bank in the middle of the night as part of her job as a futures administrator. “I had a problem with my Swiss trading position so I just needed someone to fix it,” she recalls. There was nothing extraordinary that set this overseas call apart from the many others she made each night, except that this one was about to change her destiny.

At the same time, thousands of miles away in Switzerland, a 23-year-old lad named Florian was going about his business as a futures account manager when his phone rang. “It was a woman’s voice speaking English... She told me she was from Australia and asked me what the weather was like in Switzerland,” he recalls. “So I asked her what the weather was like in Australia and there was this instant friendliness, which made the business side more enjoyable.”

As the pair began to chat casually amid their business dealings, they both realised there was more than just professional pleasantry between them. “It’s always a novelty to talk to someone on the other side of the world but there seemed to be an immediate friendly chemistry between us,” explains Jacqui. “We started talking about all sorts of things... it was easy and natural.”

When the phone call finally ended, both Jacqui and Florian were left with a strange but pleasant buzz, not to mention a niggling urge to call the other again. The next night, Florian gave in to that urge and phoned Jacqui at work. Over the next couple of weeks, Jacqui looked forward to her night shifts where she could spend a few minutes talking with the friendly young man from Switzerland. The pair soon developed a long-distance friendship and decided to exchange personal phone numbers so they could continue their conversations after work. “We’d spend hours on the phone at home talking about our lives, our dreams, our relationships,” says Jacqui. “Sometimes, we’d talk about things we perhaps couldn’t talk about with our local friends... I just felt safe and comfortable with him because we had nothing to lose and no repercussions.”

As time went on the calls became almost a nightly occurrence and the phone bills began to mount. “Sometimes we’d be on the phone from the moment I came home until I went to bed; the [phone] bills were around $1,200 a month – and that was in 1996!” Jacqui laughs.

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