Five years ago, on the way to my office in Moscow, I was mildly inconvenienced by an apparently malfunctioning bank cash machine.
Thousands of Russians, it turned out, were suffering the same problem, and over the following days and weeks many more had their savings frozen, mislaid or just pinched.
Russia's decision, on 17 August 1998, to devalue the rouble and default on tens of billions of dollars of debt pitched the country into economic and political turmoil.
But five years later, maybe the term "mild inconvenience" is a more appropriate description.
Rouble trouble
It didn't seem like that at the time.
During the sweaty summer of 1998, as investors scrambled to pull their money out, interest rates rose to 250%, and the IMF camped permanently in the Kremlin, it was obvious that something nasty was going to happen.
But the sheer speed of Russia's financial meltdown was still breathtaking.
Most banks just didn't bother opening their doors again after 16 August.
The rouble, which had been rock-steady at around six to the dollar for months, instantly dropped to 20, and kept heading south.
Within days, as stocks of imported goods began to run low, many shops simply ran out.
The Russian media, never willing to underplay a story, started talking excitedly of famine.
Who's hurting?
In the event, however, it was hard to find much evidence of suffering.
Westerners with salaries fixed in dollars became four times richer overnight.
Most well-off Russians, their savings long ago converted into dollars or deutschmarks, were able to watch the rouble slide with equanimity.
For poor Russians, meanwhile, who never handle dollars, travel abroad, or buy imported goods, the situation was equally irrelevant.
Even the emerging middle classes - the source, it is always said, of Russia's eventual prosperity - were always wary of banks and careful with their little cash.
Many were mightily put out, but few ultimately ended up out of pocket.
Tetchy times
The first days' panic quickly subsided into a situation universally known as "crisis", but with little of the sense of urgency the term implies.
The period certainly took its toll on nerves: just as Russians had learned to stop worrying about survival, they were pitched back into something like the wearying atmosphere of the early 1990s.
Shops restocked quickly enough, but the simplest purchase took far more mental effort.
Much time and trouble was wasted establishing that, for example, a booth on Petrovka was offering the town's best rouble rate, or that a bank on the Arbat could process credit-card transactions.
Like many, I often had to travel to Estonia, Germany or the UK, bringing back bags bulging with dollar bills to help keep my office going.
The collective effect of these nuisances was immeasurable.
But a tetchy population helped produce a period of political instability, with an ever-changing government and renewed snarling from extremists on the right and left.
Competitive edge
The economy, meanwhile, boomed.
Output shrank - although not by much - in 1998 itself, but devaluation helped pave the way for a period of extraordinary economic resurgence.
Government finances, the curse of the pre-August economy, were cleared up at stroke, albeit a somewhat draconian one.
And helped by a sustained rise in petroleum and other commodity prices, Russia's important oil and metals exporters were suddenly awash with cash.
Better still, modest Russian manufacturers, many of which had been frozen out by foreign competition, at last found a ready market for their products.
Foreign investors, whose memories are notoriously short, were quickly back in the Russian market, and some have even started putting money into real factories and offices, rather than more ephemeral shares and bonds.
Russia reborn
Could it happen again?
In some ways, the Russia of 2003 is a very different country.
In Vladimir Putin, it has a stable, nationalist, authoritarian president - the near-opposite of the hapless, erratic Boris Yeltsin.
The state budget is in tolerable shape, and the government bond market - turned into a high-yielding pyramid scheme during the fiscal scramble of mid-1998 - is now a sober affair.
Russian shoppers, who used to go wild for imported goods, even staples such as milk, are now happy to buy mainly Russian-made products.
The rouble quickly found its level, around 30 in the dollar, and has remained stable for years now.
Echoes of 1998
But just because this is not 1998 does not mean that Russia won't crash.
The promised clear-out of bad banks has been a largely cosmetic exercise: in 1998, Russia had 1,500 banks, most of them little more than brass plates - now, it still has over 1,300.
An awful lot of excitable foreign money is again washing around in the Russian system, producing a near-quadrupling in the stock market since the beginning of 2001.
And given the lack of material reforms under Mr Putin, it is hard not to believe that heady economic growth is being fuelled solely by oil prices, which have long been about three times higher than the $10-per-barrel trough hit in 1998.
Despite continual talk to the contrary, Russia has made no effort to diversify its economy away from the fairly brainless business of digging resources out of the ground and selling them abroad.
Unprocessed petroleum and metals account for more than half of all exports, the same proportion as in 1998.
If commodity prices take a serious tumble, they could take the Russian economy down, too.
The bigger they are...
And it would matter a lot more this time.
In 1998, Russia was politically important, but economically negligible.
International banks had a few hundred million dollars - chump change to them - in worthless Russian bonds, but the rest of the world business community had little at stake.
Now, foreign firms have piled into Russia - and Russian firms have for the first time started to look abroad, buying assets and selling their products to the outside world.
Five years ago, Russia was big and scary; now, it is a respected and active fixture in global diplomacy.
If Russia went wrong now, it would be more than a mild inconvenience.
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