Day 333 - Banking

 BANKING

Prompt - Banking : Write about visiting the bank

A challenge from the past.  I'd looked unbelieving when I took the slip of paper from the envelope.  A blast from the past, a link to the ancients, an outdated practice.  A cheque.  I had paid for the ticket of the resolutely non IT literate, very analogue, Jennifer and she had sent me this by way of repayment.  A small printed rectangle with lines and numbers and handwriting on it.  A cheque.

Should I cash it?  Or frame it?  As a testament to the last desperate skirmishes against the onslaught of digital progress.  No, she'd be insulted if the payment didn't go through.  I would have to pay it into my account.  And that meant going somewhere I hadn't been for about two years.  A bank.  It also meant reminding myself of the process of paying in, which itself was no doubt more automated than it had the last time I had to do this.  Which was....  I couldn't remember when.  

Somewhere, in one of my drawers, I probably still had a cheque book.  It might even have paying in slips, although I'd be prepared to wager they were from an era before they became machine readable.  I tried to remember the last time I might have written a cheque.  There was someone, four or five years ago, who'd insisted on one as payment.  But who, and for what, and when, eluded me.  This is how life goes.  Thirty years ago it would have been the most natural of actions.  I would have habitually carried my chequebook in  jacket pocket.  More convenient, easier to keep track of, than cash.  State of the art.  

But so much can change in one lifetime.  At least in the last two hundred years, as horse gave way to trains and telegraphs and then to internal combustion engines, and then, and then...  Progress became exponential.  In the past half century, as the computer gained a bigger a bigger role in our lives, until it became a home essential.  Not to be internet connected was to be part of a deprived underclass.  Even the Jennifer's of this world had had to accept that.

So off to the bank I went.  The layout had changed.  There were a couple of assistants, already talking to other customers.  I was on my own.  Locating the paying machines was easy, although finding the paying slips took a bit longer.  I guess even banks don't expect to see these transactions very often now.  Filled in, I took it to machine, and followed the instructions on the screen.  It took about two minutes, mostly because I kept double checking (ha ha) that I'd got everything the right way round.  And then it was done.  My account should be richer by twenty five.

An assistant came over as I was turning.

"Everything OK sir?  No problems?"

"No, nice and easy" I lied, "why'd you ask?"

"Most people find it strange, because it's something they haven't done in a long time."

"I managed."  I tried to make it sound like a minor triumph.   I didn't want her to think I was the sort of person who got a lot of cheques...