Checks piss me off. I hate writing them, and I hate dealing with them. Before I moved out of my parents' house, I had probably written about three checks ever. And I liked it that way.

Probably the thing that gets me most pissed about checks is the fact that it's paper. It's a stupid scrap of paper saying that you'll pay X dollars to Y for Z reason. And you verify the paper by signing it, which I also take issue with. It seems to me that a signature isn't that hard to forge. I mean, you could probably get some handwriting analyst to notice some differences, but the whole idea of authenticating something via an easily duplicated method seems worthless to me.

Another thing that bugs me is that checks take so long to clear. If I worked at a bank and needed to cash a check, I'd look in the account of the person paying. Does it have enough money to pay the check? Yes. BAM! Done. But instead, it takes several days. My roommate (who works at a large bank) offered the explanation that banks do this with checks because they closely monitor how much money they have at the end of each day and waiting on cashing checks helps control this. I don't know if that is the only reason for this, but it still gets me pissed regardless.

A few months ago, I set up my roommate as a payee on my bank account so that I'd never have to write any more checks for rent. I paid him online, but instead of simply transferring the money like we expected, the bank sent him a stupid horking check in the mail. I was pissed, and so was he. I'm surprised we haven't gotten to the point of being able to easily transfer money between people online yet without the use of a third-party (PayPal).

Another thing I don't like is mail, for mostly the same reasons - it's paper, it's slow and cumbersome, and it's a pain. I can say with complete honesty that I have probably sent under ten things in the mail in my entire life, and it's already too many. Plus, dealing with stupid horking stamps is a pain. Why do we still have those?

As you can probably guess, I had to mail a check last night, which combined two of my least favorite things into one annoyance. You know who writes checks and mails junk? Old people. That's enough reason not to right there.

</rant>