This may cause heart attacks in a couple of people who have known me for years, so if you're one of those people and you happen to have wandered in here, make sure you're sitting down and have medical care standing by:

I have almost completely abandoned writing and mailing paper checks.

Now, if you haven't known me for years, and thus have not been subjected to my rants on this, or if you're under the age of thirty which means you probably think writing checks is a Pleistocene habit anyway, you may not understand the import of this statement.

Here's the thing: Paper checks, and the paper bills/invoices one pays with those checks, are one of those (many) things where none of the attempts to improve the system have actually improved the system, and in some ways have made the system worse.

Yes, you can kite checks. This is sometimes as much a feature as a bug. Sometimes it's useful to be able to write a promise to pay an amount you don't have, if you're confident in your gamble that the money will actually be there by the time the promise is called in. You are using "float."

Float is the time between when you write the check and it actually gets processed. This could be a lot longer than you think. The check-processing system isn't very efficient, which is one reason banks are salivating to get rid of it. Businesses used float as a technique for many decades, though they didn't like that to be public knowledge, and some careful/smart schlubs like us were known to use it as well.

When I was living hand to mouth, I routinely took advantage of the fact that the check I was sending in the mail to pay a particular bill would not actually be called due for at least a week -- but I could claim to have paid the bill on time, because that check was in play. No surcharges, no penalties ... and no need for anyone to know that the money wasn't actually there until three days after the check was written. (And I seldom ever bounced a check, by the way.)

There was, of course, sometimes check fraud. Here in our neck of the woods there was a rash of checkwashing incidents lasting close to two years; it ended last year when it was found to be almost entirely the work of one group of people, who were all arrested. These clowns would actually grab the checks from mail boxes -- the blue Postal Service mail boxes, I mean -- which had the side effect of making the USPS aware of just how insecure those boxes were, and most of the ones in my area have now been replaced with ones that have better security features.

Which brings us to why I have finally, at nearly sixty, reversed my long-standing course on paper checks: I just don't trust the postal service anymore.

This is, of course, exactly the outcome Yr Government Of Thugs wants. They badly want to destroy the USPS because there is no grift in it. They want all the mail business to go to people like Amazon who run the whole thing for profit and kick back generous amounts to the Grifter-In-Chief. In many countries, the postal service is a force for literacy and good citizenship. It facilitates things like voter registrations. In some nations it even offers reliable consumer banking. The Grift Government hates all that stuff, just like they hate everything that might make life better for us schlubs, not because they hate us schlubs (though they usually do), but because Helping The Schlubs is seen by them as a financial loss.

Almost all government services that actually do something useful are viewed as a waste of money by them. The idea of a service, like the post office, that is not intended to make a profit is something that causes them to lose sleep at night.

That said, the post office would have problems even if they weren't trying to destroy it. Because no one writes personal mail anymore.

I have a drawer -- a very large filing cabinet drawer -- full of personal correspondence, letters to me that I've kept. Most of it is from my college years, such as they were. I had one person who kept up a paper correspondence well into the 2000s, but they were the only exception. I haven't added a new letter to the file in many years.

What the postal service delivers these days is junk mail -- which is also on the decline, as people stop reading anything printed on physical media, so it's become a bad PR bet for the corporates -- and the occasional package, for which they often cannot compete on reliability with firms like UPS, because their budget for doing so has been steadily plundered. (We should not be seeing fleets of UPS planes. We should be seeing fleets of USPS planes. We should be in a position where UPS et al are complaining about how they are being driven out of business by a government monopoly on efficient, cheap, package delivery. We should be in a place where there is no need for UPS. Obviously, that did not happen.)

Anyway, the post office has become extremely unreliable. My spouse tracks incoming mail so she can see if something was supposed to arrive today and didn't. Often it didn't. We have a peculiar situation, mind you: Our house number is the same as the house next door, but on a different street. That is, you drop mail at 15 Their Street, turn the corner, and drop mail for our house at 15 Our Street. And this is exactly how the mail is presorted in the carrier's bag, which means that if they're not attentive about the street name change while they're fingering through their bag, our mail goes to the wrong house. Usually a mail carrier gets it after about three months; the problem is, three months seems to be about how long a mail carrier lasts on the job.

I have also, I admit, gotten tired of writing checks, of making sure we always have stamps, of making sure to bring the envelopes with me the next time I take a walk and will pass a mail box, et cetera. But mostly it's that I no longer trust that bills will arrive reliably, so I've had to try to circumvent that part of the process.

Unfortunately, it's also kind of a pain in the ass. I have only achieved what I consider optimal conditions for three of the many bills I pay every month. For the gas, electric, and cable/internet bill, I have it set up so that they tell my bank "hey a bill's due" and the bank sends me an email reminding me (which I ignore because I pay bills on the first of the month, no matter when they're actually due). I log in at my bank's website and press some buttons. Pow.

For my cell phone, for various reasons some years ago I just gave up and allowed them to do fully automatic debiting from my bank. I get a text every month saying "hey, we're gonna bill you this amount" and another two days later saying "hey, we billed you this amount." No intervention required.

That's actually less optimal to me than the go-to-bank-site-and-press-button method, because I like having a required manual approval step. I do not trust any of these companies with autopay, not a bit. None of them has the slightest moral character; moral character does not sit well with profit. If they can take out money without needing the go word from you, then they have no barriers to one day just deciding to drain your bank account. Sure, they'd face all kinds of penalties when they got caught at it, but, y'know, catching them at it after they drain your bank account is of limited effectiveness.

That said (knock wood) Verizon has not yet defrauded me, to the best of my knowledge. And they don't spam me very much, except that they really think I should replace my phone more often than I do.

With my credit card, I have long since gotten in the habit of going to their site to make payments by hand. That was the first thing that "went paperless," years ago, because I monitor my credit card very closely and was logging onto the site all the time to check on it anyway. And when I began to embrace virtual cards, I used their site even more because I firewall my virtual cards; I keep them disabled, so when I use them, it's 1) activate the card 2) make purchases on Slightly Shady Web Site (each virtual card is for a single site only) 3) deactivate the card.

Those are the successful ones. Last year, our mortgage lender informed us that the writing was on the wall (we'd been getting hints for a year or two before that) and they really wanted to get out of the business of sending us a book of paper coupons to mail in with our payment checks. OK, fine, can't blame them for that, seeing as how I'm getting out of the paper-mail business too, but the thing is, the mortgage is not for exactly the same amount every month. Even if I'm making an electronic payment, I need to be able to know how much it's for. And I can't seem to get it set up so they send my bank a "hey, you owe this much by this date" the way the utilities do.

And I can't log on directly to our mortgage lender's web site to see any outstanding amounts, because ... urgh, this entry's long enough already. Maybe I'll discuss that the next time I rant about voice communications. Short version: I ask my spouse to go see how much I need to pay that month, I go to my bank's site, and I send an electronic payment by hand.

The newspaper, we have still not figured out how to get to accept electronic transactions from my bank. Their "pay online" method is you log into your account on the newspaper's site and pay there. By credit card. Another process to have to keep track of.

There is probably an electronic way to pay the quarterly water/sewer bill from the city, and the yearly auto excise tax bill from the city, but I'll just keep writing the city paper checks for those for a while. I have to pick my battles.

There's one more bill I pay every month which, at the moment, still has to be paid by check ... but that can also wait for the next time I rant about voice communications. I'm sure everyone's on the edge of their seats.

Anyway, the point is, on balance, is having to do all these different processes in different places, and keep track of them (writing checks is self-documenting! I use duplicating checks! have for my entire adult life!) really an improvement over writing ten checks and hauling them to a mail box every month? Is this actually progress?

I'm still not at the point where I can quite convince myself it is.