#391 – Green

There was a weird transition time where some bills were easily paid online and some had to be mailed in. I even remember a few that charged a “convenience fee” to pay your bill electronically. It took until 2011 for my last straggling utility bill to catch up and go online. As a side effect I don’t pay attention to my mail as much as I used to. So important things can sneak by.

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14 thoughts on “#391 – Green”

  1. fluffy says:

    Then there were all the bills that could be paid online but they’d send a paper letter thanking you for every single payment. Hell, I *still* get those from T-Mobile (two of them, actually, because somehow I ended up with a second account where one of them has a balance forward of $2.14 from an overpayment).

  2. I still have one bill that I mail in (my garbage man is local) but even that I *could* send by Paypal if I wanted to save a stamp.

    I love living in the future. I pay bills digitally, read books on a tiny Star-Trek tablet, and have friends I’ve never met!

  3. kingklash says:

    My town’s small enough, that I pretty much can walk to pay utilties and cable, and mail the rent. I still get a lot of paper for even the smallest transaction.

  4. sam says:

    I miss paper… I think I’ll go hug my printer…

  5. I shudder to think what they’ll send him when he gets the digital version of that!

  6. Joey says:

    Hm, how would you mail in a bill payment? Around here (Germany) all such things are done via wire transfer and have been for quite a while.

  7. rick2tails says:

    Joey, you would get a bill in the mail with an amount due. you would write a check or buy a money order in the ammount of the debt. You would put it in an envelope (often pre adressed) and then you would put postage on it and mail it.

    I still get paper bills in the mail and pay online.I like having a physical copy instead of having to print it out myself,spending my ink and paper and time .

    1. Joey says:

      I get paper bills all the time and pay as usual; I scan every piece of paper I’m likely to need again, though because I otherwise won’t find it again (ok, I would for some but not for others). But indeed, checks are virtually unknown in Europe. In fact, I have never seen one to date.

      1. Lone says:

        Europe? You sure it’s not just Germany? Because I’m only 16 and I’ve dealt with quite a lot of checks. Only one of them were mine, though. x’)

        1. kit says:

          I’m in Latvia (that’s one of those poor and tiny post-soviet European countries), 38, and have never seen a paper check, either.

          1. Charlotte says:

            The UK has cheques but they’re being phased out in favour of direct debits and bank transfers a lot of the time. Usually I only get cheques on Christmas and Birthdays when family members put them in the card, and I haven’t had to write one in years (I’m not even sure where my chequebook is these days).

            Although I did have a company send me some compensation for something as a cheque recently, which surprised me as that’s the sort of thing they’d usually just credit by bank tansfer.

  8. Dan says:

    Speaking of paper copies, what’s going to be the fate of paper dictionaries?That old super volume dictionary in the shelf just became even more valuable.

  9. Bob says:

    I love how an extra page gets added to a bill, and the only meaningful content is an orphaned line that didn’t fit on the first page, suggesting I should go paperless. I pay all my bills electronically but I get half of them mailed to me. I think I write maybe one check a year. I have a book of ‘forever stamps’ and I keep wondering if the Post Office is going to go out of business before I use them all. Speaking of dictionaries, I have an unabridged dictionary, but all I use it for these days is Scrabble.

  10. pbarnrob says:

    I took an Econ class, Summer Quarter 1967, and at that time, three-quarters of money in the world was ‘bits on tape’. Now, it’s probably 95 to 99 percent (even if the tape has changed to ‘domains in a platter’), even though there is still SOME cash around here. I have one paper bill left, the tiny local water company, that I pay with a paper check. Oh- two; and the community health program that I had before Medicare kicked-in, and the wife still does.
    Cracks me up, too, when paper bills still come; if the back is blank, they’re grist for printing other stuff.

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