DO YOU KNOW and/or remember what “checks” are? They are pieces of paper upon which you write money words such as “This many dollars and some amount of cents” and then you corroborate that by writing the actual numerals, and then because it has your Account Number on the Check, and your Bank’s “Tracking Number,” it’s a real Check and people will accept it as a way to get money from you. Checks are not obsolete, I guess there’s still an important Legal reason for pieces-of-paper checks, and there’s lotsa people who don’t want to do Internet and Venmo and be PayPals with Bitcoins so the pieces of paper are still around, and I do not want! They are a pain in my ass! Why do I still have to have these? 21st Century!
If I Get Paid from somebody who sends me a Check, I have to “endorse it,” to wit: write my name and bank account number on the back of it, with a pen, in handwriting, with my bare hand, and then I have this bunch of dopey choices:
To take it to a Bank. Go INSIDE A BUILDING, wait in line with the Check, plus another stupid little piece of paper, the Deposit Slip, where you write, again, with your own hand, and a pen, the amount of the Check that’s already stated right there on the goddmn check, plus your account number, again, that you already wrote with your cramping hand on the back of the Check and then you write the numerals from the check, money-wise, and you hand it to somebody who records the transaction and hands you another stupid little piece of paper, the Receipt, for your Deposit.
Or, you do the deposit on an ATM, which is a little better because you don’t have to make a Deposit Ticket, you just feed it into the ATM. But you gotta make sure it’s not an ATM that’s gonna CHARGE YOU for doing the transaction! Fuckers!
Also-or, and this is the thing I usually do, use an app from the Bank to take a picture of the Endorsement-written-upon check with my Phone-Cam, and send that to the Bank via an app. How fucking ridiculous is this shit? Here’s a picture of my Handwriting and some numbers! Urgh.
Wait, one more: You could mail the endorsed check and a Deposit Ticket to the bank via the USPS, har!
So I have a couple of things in my monthly/yearly Nut where I still have to pay with a stupid fucking Check. There are outfits in The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-One and No Cents who do not have a modern and convenient way for one to just text them the money-numbers or whatever, and the one that pisses me off the most is the Check I have to write for Ground Rent.
Ground Rent! You ever hear of this? I am a Homeowner, and on the house in which I dwell I haz Mortgage, which I pay by blipping some money-numbers outta my Checking Account to the website where the Mortgage is. I send them the numbers, I tell them it’s from my Bank, and my mortgage is Paid, plus a little extra on the Principal, always do that, it knocks down the length of the Mortgage. The Mortgage, it’s not an inconsiderable amount of money, but all it takes is me pecking some stuff into my computer or Cellular Telephone. Paid! Meanwhile and however, here in Baltimore, Maryland, America, I do not own or otherwise have a Mortgage on the Ground where my house is located. What? Ground Rent!
The Ground, somehow, or the ability to charge Rent for it, belongs to some company from the Olden Days, some feudal bullshit, I dunno, and I have to pay $96 a year Rent for the Ground upon which my goddamn castle rests. And these fuckers don’t take money except by check! I guess I could just not use a check and go to the supermarket or something and get a Money Order—which still means I have to write stuff and pay for the piece of paper I am writing money-numbers on—and while I’m at it, write a check for my fucking groceries? Maybe I could bring to the supermarket all the pennies I have in the change jar in the kitchen and pay my Ground Rent with a Coinstar voucher? Fuck that, though, do you know what the rake is on a Coinstar? 11.9 percent! Unless you hand it over to that clown with the rocket.
Plus, right now, Breaking News, I am out of Checks! I have to order more Checks from the Bank! I have to pay money for a box of stupid fucking Checks, slips of paper with numbers on them, so I can write more Checks that I don’t want to! From my Checking Account. No!