non-electronic money

[frandroid]

warriorsavant was just talking about the difficulty of cashing a cheque in Paris. Which reminded me to pay rent (!), which almost became difficult because after doing a massive clean-up on my office to have guests sleep in it, I misplaced my chequebook. Worse come to worst, I could have taken a cheque from another one, but I like to keep my cheques in order. Finally found the thing.

Many of our coöp's systems are fairly antiquated, but they do take automatic card payments for rent, or you can even go to the office and pay with a banking card, I think. But I love manually writing cheques. Just like I like sending money in the mail. Yes! When I started my zine distro 25 years ago*, PayPal was in its formative stages and not yet in use everywhere, so I bought zines the way everyone else did, by sending money in the mail. You don't send coins, or if you do, you tape them to a piece of cardboard so that they don't rattle in the enveloppe and also can't be felt by greedy postal workers. These days, when I have transactions with zinesters I haven't dealt with before, especially if they have a web store (e.g. Etsy), I don't get weird and just use PayPal. But for some of my old peeps, I stick dollars in an enveloppe, properly camouflage its contents, and off it goes. And zinesters are so happy to get paper mail, too, as much as I am to send it. I've never lost a cent sending money through the mail, though I have lost a few dollars here and there from Canadian customers not securing their loonies or toonies in their enveloppes, back when my customers were also sending in money for their orders.

One time I was sending over US$100 to Cometbus and unbeknownst to me, the goddamn enveloppe fell out of my coat pocket on the street before I could put it in a mailbox. I told Aaron who thought there was no chance it hell it would get there, but lo and behold, two weeks later, he wrote back to tell me the money had made it! Yay for this part of Toronto the Good, eh.

I'm also a cash person in real life, even though the local credit unions are making it harder and harder to retrieve money from their machines beyond office hours, probably due to homeless people taking over their booth? There's really been a shift in the last year. Since the pandemic most cashiers have stopped pretending that someone might pay in cash, and at every transaction I have to announce that I'm paying cash to avoid having the cashier input the transaction in the terminal needlessly. When they're new at this job it sometimes doesn't register, they enter the transaction anyway, and then I hand them cash, at which point it clicks.

(Like, I'm not a troglodyte, I have two credit cards and two banking cards from different institutions, and I will sometimes use them when the amount is large or my efforts at withdrawing money were foiled by these reluctant credit unions. My bank (an account I have due to having worked for such an institution) has ATMs all across the city but I'm in a kind of dead zone, walking-distance wise, in relation to the stores I shop at.)

*: My zine distro is 25 years old this month! It's an auspicious number, but it mostly makes me realize that I'm getting Old. Which bums me out. Not for Being Older, per se, but because it brings me closer to the end, even if it's another 50 years away. I don't want to spend the last 25 years of it waiting for death, like I see in my MIL's retirement home. I better get walking.