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Check-writing as a spectator sport

By James D. McCallister

“Lord love a duck,” I bellowed. The line snaked through the toll plaza of checkout lanes at a familiar big box retailer, but the problem wasn’t just that El Grande Mercado supercenter was busy on this scorching afternoon, oh no: There were extenuating circumstances. “Is that woman up there writing a check?”

The elderly woman’s pen made a dry, scratching sound as she carefully wrote out the amount she owed to her neighborhood purveyor of essential goods; she paused every so often to smack her lips and think about the next tidbit of information she needed to compose and then hand-print. I couldn’t see it but I knew that squiggly, Clint Eastwood forehead-vein I get in times of undue stress was visibly pulsing in time to the Lite Rock that echoed down from the girders overhead. Hey, I was a normal American boy in the middle of a busy afternoon—time was my enemy.

A head had turned at my outburst: “Well, what’s wrong with writing a check?” The stout matron in front of me was hunched over a shopping cart that fairly brimmed with processed and frozen food products. She flipped through a copy of Celebrity Strumpet, a weekly gossip rag whose current cover story touted a nightclub cat-fight between Britney and Lindsay that had arisen out of a dispute over which one of them had the most controlling, psychotic stage mother.

“It’s just ridiculous,” I said with an acidic tone. I could feel the seconds of my life ticking away, but I lowered my voice in deference to the old lady’s decrepitude. “It’s the information age. Who, pray tell,” I said sotto voce, “has time to write checks?”

“Well, she does, I reckon.” I found no solace in this sentiment, nor in the haunted look from Shia LeBouf that loomed out at me from a People magazine special edition subtitled “Aging, Non-threatening Boys We Love.” “My momma still stands there and writes them things out too,” my porcine friend added with a helpful nod. “I try to tell her, use your card, use your card, woman, but she says she cain’t remember that PIN number of hers to save her life.”

Finally, the line began to move. My check-writing nemesis hobbled out with her goods, taking her time not at all out of spite, but in obeisance to the ravages of time. She looked like my grandmother, suddenly, a woman dead now for many years. I felt like a heel for wishing this quite-alive woman to speed along her life’s chores for the sake of my impertinent impatience.

Take away all that sentimental crap, however, and the point remains that with the convenience of ATM cards—you know, they have been around, oh, a couple of decades, now, right?—why would anyone still want to stand hunched over one of those tiny platforms, scribbling out a document that fairly smacks of oh-my-god-that’s-so-last-century? I understand how people are creatures of habit, sure, but if I had osteoporosis in my back and arthritis in my knuckles (like many of the check-writers I’ve observed), I know I’d prefer to just swipe a card and be done with it. With a check, you have to pull out an ID anyway—why not skip a step?

Of course, using a bankcard has its drawbacks as well. You can’t “float” a transaction (but then, you can’t do it with checks anymore either, thanks to those know-it-all computer financial networks). If you’re floating checks, of course, that probably means you’re overspending—but guess what, you can’t do that with your bank card. If the money’s not there, the money’s not there.

On another level, to many people the idea of their every purchase being tracked, analyzed, and stored in a Big Brother memory bank somewhere is not the stuff of convenience and modernity, but of nightmares. (I know I feel that way every time I use the AMEX to renew my Internet subscription to sexyhippychickpix.com.)

With younger folks, like many of the new college students reading this column, I suspect you’ve never known a life but the one lived in sixteen-digit increments and recorded upon slips of thermal receipt paper, and as such, it’s possible that you don’t even consider such matters of privacy to be of concern.

I have a foot in both camps (my mood swings violently from complacent to fearful, you see, now that the pills have run out), but I do know this: Having been the victim once or twice of credit-card fraud, I can tell I’m glad they’re keeping an eye on my accounts. Besides, I’m not up to anything I shouldn’t be doing, like buying truckloads of fertilizer and pallets of blasting caps. Had the system not worked thus far in my favor, though, I would likely have a different attitude.

Let us part, then, with the agreement that, like many such arguments, the pros and cons of continuing to use checks to transact everyday business are too numerous for one wee opinion column to dissect. I’ll tell you this much, though: My back hurts, it’s hot outside, I’m in a hurry, so let’s get this here line moving, Granny. I need to get home and reconcile my “check book.”