#391 – Green
Posted on June 4, 2012 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comic
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.
Tags: bills, books, newspaper
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).
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!
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.
I miss paper… I think I’ll go hug my printer…
I shudder to think what they’ll send him when he gets the digital version of that!
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.
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 .
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.
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’)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.