I’m going about doing my usual monthly desk top clean-up. Not computer “desktop.” No, it’s the actual top of my desk. People still have those. You know that, right? Of course you do. Only the best and brightest (and the most bored) come to this website. During these monthly clean-ups I go about taking care of paperwork, bills, and to do lists I update. The only reason I even care to do this is to tidy the stuff that’s been sitting on the desk for the past month. This is my basic measure of time. Every month around around the second or third sunday I’m prompted by my messy desk to clean it up while listening to my favorite radio program.
My friend at work stared at me incredulously when I told him that I still write checks to pay my bills. I still pay my bills this way not because I don’t trust electronic banking payment systems, but because “I find it soothing to pay the bills by hand.” I know. I sound like a masochist, but allow me to explain. Life for me has become more and more complicated with every passing year since I started realizing this fact in grade school. I needed a way to control my life, and paying bills by hand is one of the many ways I’ve found a measure of control. The world can turn to shit, but damnit I still have the ability to write checks. I can take my sweet time to pay, while simultaneously making it more difficult for those people I owe money to collect. Forget the fact I eventually have to pay anyway, but it gives me satisfaction ignoring this fact for a little while. For my family and friends out there, I am not referring to you. I am referring to impersonal entities such as corporations, the government at every level, and that lady whose dry cleaning service lost my sports jacket a couple of weeks ago. The bitch. In knowing that I can’t do much about these entities short of being a nuisance I take the long approach. That lady whose dry cleaning service lost my jacket? I called them twice to give them the opportunity to make amends. I wasn’t going to be a jerk about it. She stated she would reimburse me for the cost of the jacket, but it’s been two weeks and I haven’t heard back from her. This is what I’m going to do. I intend to never use her service again, and I’m going to call the credit card people whose card I used to pay for the partial cleaning minus the one missing item and tell them to hold payment until I get satisfaction. I can be such a REBEL! Putting rebellion aside, it’s simple and less stressful on my part. Ahhhh! Now. Back to those bills!