I’m in a rotten mood due to a lack of sleep the past week and a half so instead of writing about what I had planned, I am going to focus on a pet peeve of mine that occurred again yesterday.

First of all, who the hell writes checks anymore for anything at a store? Haven’t these people heard of debit cards? It’s not like you can float on a few days’ reprieve by writing a check anymore. With the new Check 21 rules, your account is debited immediately at most places.

Anyway, back to what I was going to rant about. I DETEST people, usually in a grocery store line, who wait until the last minute to fill out a check for payment. Yesterday this lady in front of me waited until the cashier said the total amount, which was this lady’s cue to BEGIN to fumble around in her purse the size of Michigan for her goddamn checkbook. When she finds it, she then roots around for a pen. Now she’s finally ready to begin the long process of writing a check, which always begins with “How much was the amount again?” She begins to finally enter in the info on her check and for some reason she had to flip back and forth between her ledger for each portion of the check. So the process went something like this:
1 – Enter Date on check
2 – Flip to ledger and put in Date
3 – Enter Numeric Amount on check
4 – Flip to ledger to enter in Numeric Amount
5 – Enter in Spelled Amount on check
6 – Flip back to ledger to enter in Check Number
7 – Sign check
8 – Flip back to ledger to make sure all data is entered in correctly

By this time the milk I had bought has turned into rancid cottage cheese. The dude behind me was even more agitated and started making impatient sighs about every 10 seconds. The lady now realizes that we are both imagining different ways to kill her and tears the check quickly out of her checkbook, ripping a good portion of it in the process. Thankfully the cashier is able to process the check and the lady goes on her merry way, probably driving 10 mph under the speed limit.

If you’re ever going to write a check in front of me in line, have everything entered in besides the amount and your signature. This will allow me to direct my daydreams towards more pleasurable things in life instead of thinking up ways to dismember you and sell your limbs to the meat department while you hold up my life. After that, I’ll even give you a free “Go Directly to 2005” pass, allowing you to catch up to the progress that’s been made in the past 10 years with debit card processing.