I lose track
Jan. 24th, 2011 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I just had to go and check what year it is.
I blame the end of cheques* - I haven't had to actually write (or type) the year at all in months, so I haven't gone through the whole process of writing "2010" and then having to scribble it out to write "2011" instead.
*I haven't used a cheque in a couple of years. I assume my chequebook is somewhere in my flat, but fuck knows where. Last time we needed to pay builders/plumbers/etc. I just did a direct bank transfer.
I blame the end of cheques* - I haven't had to actually write (or type) the year at all in months, so I haven't gone through the whole process of writing "2010" and then having to scribble it out to write "2011" instead.
*I haven't used a cheque in a couple of years. I assume my chequebook is somewhere in my flat, but fuck knows where. Last time we needed to pay builders/plumbers/etc. I just did a direct bank transfer.
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Date: 2011-01-24 10:48 am (UTC)Douglas Adams and John Lloyd had a perfect word for this: Screggan.
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Date: 2011-01-24 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 10:54 am (UTC)Cheques are convenient, especially for those of us who don't like online banking. Screw the banks, I want my cheques.
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Date: 2011-01-24 10:56 am (UTC)And there's nothing to stop you transferring money and giving them a nice shiny voucher that you made yourself.
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Date: 2011-01-24 11:20 am (UTC)Thats what my grandparents did! They gave me a card with a note inside.
What about postal orders?
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Date: 2011-01-24 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 11:32 am (UTC)Ok, Postal Orders are as good as cheques, except you have to pay a small fee for them.
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Date: 2011-01-24 03:43 pm (UTC)10% of the face value is not a small fee! And they max out at £250, which makes them a lot less useful for many things.
Also, they're cleared funds, which is good in some ways (payment is pretty much guaranteed if you have it in your sweaty paws, unlike with cheques) but not so good if you, say, lose it down the back of the sofa for six months.
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Date: 2011-01-24 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 11:00 am (UTC)I refuse to do online banking -- I met enough banking IT staff in the late 90s to have a really low opinion of their security awareness and mindset.
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Date: 2011-01-24 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 11:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 11:42 am (UTC)-- Steve is uncomfortable with a lot of direct-debit transations, for no particularly good reason beyond paranoia.
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Date: 2011-01-24 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 01:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 02:19 pm (UTC)Apps for transferring money would be nice, and having a simple way of transferring account details back and forth wouldn't hurt.
I'm not too fussed by you having to be online - by 2018 everyone will be, and smartphones will own 95% of the phone market. NFC will make a difference here, too. Bump phones with someone and transfer them the cash like that.
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Date: 2011-01-24 03:39 pm (UTC)Indeed it would. I'm sure that some people would be really, really interested in a mechanism that gave you personal details from an arbitrary bank account and sort code. :-)
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Date: 2011-01-24 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 05:57 pm (UTC)PayPal is a pretty reasonable way of transferring money too (if you don't mind the costs and letting ebay have your personal details).
And I use telephone banking a fair bit too, for paying bills and transferring money to people. It would be good if there was a way that people could send your bank their bank details so you could just pick them off a list ("yes, I'd like to pay Andrew Ducker some money ... oh, you've got his details there ready to receive this money, excellent!") and that shouldn't be hard at all. It could even be obfuscated so that *I* would never learn your bank details but the bank could still make the payment into your account.
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Date: 2011-01-24 08:59 pm (UTC)Of course, at this point, I'll raise the issue of the numerous friends who claim to have had their facebook "hacked". Or just have their browser remember their details, even when not-quite-friends and random people are using their phone or their computer.
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Date: 2011-01-24 08:57 pm (UTC)You don't need a chequebook to produce a cheque. You don't even need an official form from a bank to write a cheque (though it helps)
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Date: 2011-01-25 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 08:55 pm (UTC)However, generally I'm doing this on pieces of paper that have both a prior date and a future date on them, so it gets confusing fast as to what the date really is.
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Date: 2011-01-28 05:11 pm (UTC)