A notice came last week from a newspaper I subscribe to. Since “offering check payments is becoming increasingly difficult to support,” the paper is “looking to move all our readers to digital payment methods.” The letter was bossy and presumptuous but the upshot was clear. There’s no longer anyone in the paper’s back office in the Philippines who’ll handle my checks for 11 cents an hour. So I’m going to have to start paying online.
When electronic banking first appeared I was just out of college and cursed with the drinking habits I had acquired there. The ability to manage one’s life savings at 2 o’clock in the morning struck me as more a menace than a boon. So I stuck with the checkbook, sorting the gas and magazine and (eventually) mortgage bills as they came in the mail and paying off a stack of them every week or so.
It was my mother who, in my teen years, taught me the language of check-writing and recording: the space-filling line that keeps the payee from taking $60,000 out of your account instead of $60 (a hypothetical worry, given my paper-route earnings), the use of xx/100 to mean “zero cents,” the spots for branch numbers on deposit slips. All literate Americans needed this knowledge.
They don’t anymore. One of the hardest things to impart to young people about the world before computers is how full it was of hugely important things that existed in only one perishable, losable copy. Novels: Robert Ludlum lost the manuscript of his first one in San Francisco while on shore leave, drunk. Tickets: A friend who had boasted for months that he was going to see the Red Sox showed up in school the next day not having gone, because his parents had left the tickets on the kitchen table. Hall passes: Another friend served a detention when the assistant principal stopped him in the hall and he couldn’t find his library pass.
Young people will ask: Couldn’t the assistant principal just verify that the teacher had written the hall pass? Well, maybe, but things tended not to work that way. People didn’t “follow up” and “reach out” and “circle back.” The teacher who’d written the pass didn’t deserve to be bothered. But there was a principle at stake, too: The authority had left the holder of it and now resided, rather magically, in the document itself, which had gone out into the world. This attitude was consistent with the immeasurably higher esteem in which literature was then held.
Documents were vulnerable, but they held power, too. Nice paper was important: Up until about 1995, any podunk town could support a stationer’s shop. Institutional paper was indispensable: As a young editor I would call a New York publisher and ask for a review copy of a book. They would invariably ask me to write them a letter “on company letterhead.” Why? Just ’cause.
A friend of mine described the conference invitations sent to foreign statesmen on behalf of his big Midwestern university. The stationery was commensurate with the purpose. It was on thick, creamy paper stock with a ribbon descending down the left side, sparkling with gold thread and anchored with a thick impasto of red sealing-wax. In that pre-politically correct era, they called it the Dago-dazzler. No one, not even a head of state, had ever been known to refuse an invitation issued on it.
In the 1980s, people started to “express their personality” on the most important documents of all: checks. The fad passed, but many of my first paychecks had sunsets and puppies on them. This wasn’t the dignified workingman’s lot that Bruce Springsteen had taught me to expect. It was a first sign that people were getting less dazzled by checks. And sometime in the last decade or so my lifestyle choice turned into an anachronism.
But was I wrong to think writing checks was less dangerous than the alternative? The chicanery revealed after the 2008 finance crisis, the recent leaks of personal data from Equifax and other places, which regulatory authorities appear unable or disinclined to stem—these things will eventually cost us all the time we think we have saved through “convenient” online banking. Too late now, though. You get lured through the door of innovation with the option of doing things a new way, and while you’re figuring out whether you like it, the door through which you entered slams shut. Most technological innovations are this way As the motto of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 put it: Science finds—industry applies—man conforms.
