I knew I was old when…

The Sandbox General
1

Post that moment when it became painfully obvious that you were no longer a young whippersnapper.

I’ll start.

Circa 2010…
New Teller: Welcome to ABC Bank! How may I help you?

Me: Hi! I just need a new checkbook register.

NT: Absolutely! [Reaches for something beneath counter. Produces… not a checkbook register, but a form.] Here, fill this out, and I’ll need a copy of your driver’s license.

Me: Huh? You need a form and a driver’s license to give me a checkbook register???

NT: Yes, it’s required for all new accounts.

Me: I don’t want to open a new account; I just want a checkbook register!

NT: Do you have an account here?

Me: (wondering why she would ask me that) Uh, yes, actually I do.

NT: What’s your account number?

Me: I don’t know, but look… I don’t need you to look anything up on my account; I just want a checkbook register!!!

NT: So… you want to open a new account?

Me: No! I just want a checkbook register! Do… do you know what a checkbook register is?

NT: I guess I’m not sure what you’re talking about.

:woman_facepalming:

Me: A checkbook register is a little booklet where you write down all of your transactions and keep track of your balance.

NT: Oh. Well all of that information is available online. I can show you how to set up an online account!

Me: I have an online account, and no it isn’t all available online. That’s literally why you have to track it if you want to know how much money you have available.

NT: No, it’s all on there. I’d be happy to show you how to find your balance.

Me: That’s not what a checkbook register is for. The online balance won’t show outstanding checks.

NT: Checks show on there… it shows ALL transactions!

Me: (sarcastically) Even checks that haven’t cleared yet?

NT: Oh… no, of course not.

Me: OK… that’s why you need a checkbook register. May I please have one?

NT: I don’t know what it looks like.

[I describe what it looks like, as she’s looking under the counter and in drawers… unsuccessfully.]

NT: Oh, Old Teller just finished with her client, let me ask.

[The two go to the back corner of the branch and start looking through drawers and eventually OT hands NT a checkbook register. OT helps the next person in line.]

NT: Shoot, I’m not sure how much we charge for this. Hold on…

Me: They’re free.

NT: (laughing at my hilarious joke) Well obviously that’s not true, but I’m not sure how much the charge actually is.

Me: No, seriously, they’re free.

NT: (annoyed because I am obviously trying to scam her) It’s weird that it’s not on this price list. I think I have an old price list around here, it’ll probably be on that and I’ll just charge you the old price since you’ve had to wait so long.

Me: Look I’m in here all the time. I know all the tellers by name except you, and they know me. I’m really not lying when I say they’re free. You don’t even need an account to get a free checkbook register.

[NT ignores my lunatic ranting and asks another new teller, who also doesn’t know.]

ANT: Are you ok with paying $5? It’s probably more than that, but since we’re not sure, we can just let you have it for $5.

Me: No! I’m not paying for a free checkbook register!

Finally the branch manager came over to see what all the fuss was about and confirmed that checkbook registers are, in fact, free.

We need the :heynow: emoji!

9 Likes
2

Checks? Cheques?
Who uses checks? I haven’t written a cheque in a decade or longer.

3

I probably write 10 or so a year. The last three I wrote were to contractors. With checks they don’t have to pay the cc fee. Almost all of my clients send checks although they are mostly bank generated.

I haven’t used a paper check register in decades. I use duplicate checks and keep an excel spreadsheet for tracking all of the account transactions. Makes it easy to sort at tax time.

3 Likes
4

With contractors and the like, we etransfer. SO logs into our bank account, initiates a transfer, recipient gets an email, clicks on a link and boom the money’s in their account.
We use email transfer a lot. Sell something on facebook? When they come for pickup, they have a look then email transfer right there. Good as cash, without the covid.

5

When you order new checks, isn’t there usually a new register in the box?

I write a few checks, rent, temple events and dues, gifts, personal exchanges where they don’t have venmo

6

E transfers are becoming more popular but still a lot of folks don’t do them. I offer our tenants $10 off their monthly rent if they pay on time electronically. Some still don’t do it. :woman_shrugging:

7

We go through registers a lot faster than checks these days, and I don’t even belong in this thread!

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8

I knew I was old when I could no longer dunk a basketball.

Wait. That’s when I realized I was out of shape.

But now I’m old and out of shape.

Wait. I’m in great shape.

Round.

3 Likes
9

Shoulda asked for two or three.

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10

I would if the landlord offered it

They live 20 minutes away, usually just drop off a check whe n in their neighborhood

11

Almost all my checks are electronic, and I don’t record those in the check register. I did write one last month. An unusual situation. Unexpected check, but timeliness was somewhat important. Bank check would be mailed, and bank predicted 7 days until arrival. Too late, so I wrote a check and mailed it. Actual difference in arrival times would likely not have exceeded one day, but the physical check was definitely pickup up and in the mail system that day. The bank check probably not until the next day.

:duh: I don’t think I even recorded that check in the register. Mainly tax deductible checks go in it, but also big items scheduled well in advance that I want to keep track of (e.g. Estimated US tax payments, scheduled up to a year in advance.)

12

Watching And Just Like That makes me feel old now.

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13

Also every time my kid asks me if I want to “hear a meme”.

14

Conversation with my IT guy a few years ago. He’s describing to me how a hard drive
works. I already know, but I’m letting him
tell me anyway because it’s cracking me
up

Him: There are heads in there and
readers. It’s kind of like one of those old
fashioned music player things, where
you’d have a round disk, and this arm
thing with a thing on the end of it that
would come down and play the music
from the disk

Me: You mean a record player?

Him: Yeah! That’s it!

Me: You’ve never played a record on a
record player, have you?

Him: No. But my parents had them when I was a kid.

1 Like
15

Well this was over a decade ago!

And at the time I was forced to pay both my mortgage and my HOA fee by check… the two biggest bills I had. And I was writing checks for some of my charitable stuff.

So it was pretty necessary (to me) to track it all.

Also, online bill pay stuff took longer to clear in those days too. So if my account had $1,000 in it and I had a $600 credit card bill that I’d paid electronically on Monday but the funds didn’t get deducted from my account until Thursday… by Wednesday I might forget and see that I had $1,000 and then pay something else that cost $700.

:grimacing::grimacing::grimacing:

I didn’t stop balancing the checkbook until hubby & I got married and then keeping track of all of his transactions just wasn’t going to happen.

But I keep a much larger balance in our joint checking account now than I did when I was single. There’s also a bigger cushion / things aren’t as tight as they were when I was freshly divorced and living in an expensive condo.

16

Yes! When I was fresh out of college and you had to pay for everything by check, the ratio of checks written to lines on the provided checkbook register was such that I never had more transactions than fit in the provided registers. I accumulated registers because I was writing checks faster than I was going through the accompanying registers.

But as I adopted online bill pay I was writing fewer and fewer checks, yet had just as many transactions requiring line-items on the register. The ratio of checks written to lines on the provided checkbook register shifted and I was going through the registers faster than I was writing checks.

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17

So your saying you’ve known you were old for over a decade now?

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18

Yeah… I just randomly thought about that conversation as we were talking about checkbook registers / balancing checkbooks at work yesterday and wondering if they still teach that in school. (Probably not.)

19

Nice humblebrag about still being young enough to be working.

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20

I bought a Honda in 2002, just as they were rolling out the ability to pay online. But they wanted me to pay something like $5 for that privilege. So I just kept writing checks and licking envelopes, knowing it was costing Honda more to deal with a paper check than an ETF.

Eventually, maybe a year later, they sent me a letter knowing that making an online payment was now free.

I guess this makes me old. My parents weren’t exactly early adopters, we had a rotary phone for a while when I was a kid.