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What Was Writing A Check? A Dirt Nap City Dead End · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Hey Alex, how you doing?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: Hey man, how's it going?
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's going well.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um just sitting here thinking about all the things we used to do that we don't do anymore.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that sounds like a dead end.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: It is a dead end, isn't it?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, dead ends can be bad, they can be good, they can be things that I think even things that we sometimes still do, but just don't do as often.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's what mine kind of is today.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's something that still happens pretty frequently, but a lot less than it used to, you know?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like just staring straight ahead, you mean?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, like staring straight or or or um or not checking your phone every five minutes, right?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, no, I want to I want to play something for you.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: I want you to give this a listen and I'm gonna see if you can tell from this uh effect um what I'm talking about.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Just writing writing by hand?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Writing and then doing something.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: What's that last part?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: That last part, it sounded like you like it, was it maybe a legal pad and you ripped a page off of the legal pad.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: Let me let me do it for you live.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna do this for you live.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna actually do it with a real thing too.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Writing, oh writing checks.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Writing checks.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Are you still doing this?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: I still write checks.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: I have a checkbook right here on my desk.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: I just used it to demonstrate.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: You're still writing 1989 on your checks?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: I I uh well, I'll tell you, writing checks is a thing that neither of my children, I think, have ever written a check.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: Has uh your son ever written a check?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I don't know how many checks I've written in his lifetime.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, 20.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: So in the last 20 years.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the thing is, um, checks are very, very um common still, but the the popularity has gone down because of electronic processing.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: Also, you know, writing a check was kind of a complicated system.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: You'd have to write the check, give it to the grocery store or whatever, then the grocery store would send it to their financial institution, you know, along with all the other payments from that day.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then that check would be sent to the uh regional reserve bank or a clearing house, and then that reserve bank would present the check to the original financial institution.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: The original institution would then deduct the amount out of your account, and then it would clear and you would get it back in the mail.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: Think of all the wasted gasoline and trucks and airplanes and whatever you had to have to get those checks from place to place.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, millions of checks, right?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, I I I don't look out at it fondly as as you did.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: That was a pain.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no, no, no.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't necessarily look at it fondly.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I just I just think it's interesting that for so long we did this really complicated process.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: Now, do you know one of the big things that actually helped um push through the change to get rid of checks?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: To get rid of checks?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, to to to make checks less popular.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: It it it was something uh it was an act that happened in 2003 and was uh took effect in 2004, but there was something that happened before that that made us decide not to do that long process or to make it harder to do that long process.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because this was obviously before smartphones then, if it was that long ago.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it was probably and a lot of people didn't trust online banking when they first did that, so it couldn't have been that.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Nope, nope.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, no, what was it?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: And and the Federal Reserve, by the way, has been in charge of checks since 1914.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: So this process has been going on.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: No, what what happened is on the days after 9-11, um, because all of the airports and a lot of the transportation was ground to a halt, the whole processing system for processing checks came to a came to a halt.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: So these checks that had to get taken, because the paper itself was considered the uh legal equivalent.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: It was the legal equivalent of the money.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: It was that piece of paper.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh everything ground to a halt.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if checks had been written, they couldn't flow through that process physically because they couldn't be flown from place to place.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so the government came up with what they called the check clearing for the 21st century century act or check 21.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: You ever heard of check 21?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: That that was uh passed in 2003 and then it took effect in 2004 and basically created incentives for banks to move to um electronic images.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: And what happened is once that became law under Check 21, the piece of paper still was a legal equivalent, but an image of that paper that met certain standards was also a legal equivalent.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: So scanning or photographing that thing meant that the capture of the picture of the front and the back of that check meant that that was the same thing as the check monetarily.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess that act cleared the way for all the technology that came after that.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: So now all you have to just take a picture of your check and you're good.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: Mobile deposits and all that sort of thing.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think my favorite part about the check, writing the check.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Can you guess what it is?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is it writing out the number?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's the it is part of that.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's at the end of the dollars, how you say that there's no sense.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right, zero, zero over over you make a fraction?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I would put the word no over, I think I put the word NO.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: No, you're not supposed to do it like that.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Your checks are all void.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, they taught us that in school.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: What school did you go to where you learned to write checks?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was a check writing school.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't go there.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: You uh I'd write like 34 out in words.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: Was this home economics?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: 34 and no and oh over 100, and then you have to put the squiggly line right so somebody doesn't.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody can go in and zeros.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: You write the squiggly line, so nobody like goes in there and just says, and plus a hundred dollars for Kelly.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: No, um, so that is so difficult to actually write out like an amount, like four thousand three hundred and forty-two dollars and eighty-six cents.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: It to write that out in in script is is very difficult, right?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: Or cursive.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: Or in cursive, yeah.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: Just just to come up with how do I write this out?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: And then would you write the word dollars and then the no over a hundred?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: Or or because it already said dollars on the check, it you know, usually on the check, it already I didn't write the word dollars, no.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: You didn't write the word.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I would write the word dollars.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I would write, you know, 300 redundant and 22 dollars.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then if it was zero cents, I put two zeros over a hundred.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't do the no.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: But then what if somebody would come along and put a one in front of those two zeros?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: Then it's another dollar.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Another dollar, you're you jammed.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: You gotta watch for that guy coming after you that can write, can just make it different.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, funny, funny thing.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: One of my friends who I don't know if you've ever met him before, he's he were we were talking about him earlier as my alternate date to the to the Weezer concert.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he when we were in school, he came to visit me.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: He went to school in uh Illinois and he came down to visit one of my camp friends.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: And when he left, he said, Hey, I I got a little something for you.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I feel I feel like I owe you something for staying with you for a week and eating your food and hanging out.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so I just wanted you to have this.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: And he wrote me a check and handed it to me, and it was for like$10 million.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, cool.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: And then he said, Here you go.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a real check.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote me a real check for$10 million.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I had what do you think is the largest check you ever wrote?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was six figures.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was six figures for work.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: You wrote it by hand, you got to write it out, or you typed it?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh no, I I wrote it out by hand.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was you wrote that whole thing?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then you wrote the and and and then you write the squiggy line.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: You probably didn't have to write the squiggy line because it was so long.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: I I had to like proofread it seven times, you know, before I could hand it over.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, yeah, it was it was actually a it was actually a tax payment that I was mailing in when I was still mailing tax payments.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: I guess mine was probably when you you know when you close on a house, don't you have to like write a big check on a down payment or something?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, here's the kind of funny thing about that, actually.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: You you kind of you kind of got to one of the one of the interesting points about this is that while the volume of checks written today has drastically decreased, the average value of each check has drastically increased.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that's because people don't write checks for the grocery store anymore.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: They don't write checks, you know, to pay a friend or for dinner or anything like that, but they do write them for buying a house, for buying a car, you know, for those large purchases.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so while we don't write checks as often, the checks we do write tend to be bigger.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder what the smallest check I've ever written is.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like I don't think I've ever written a check for under a dollar.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Less than a dollar.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Then you would write no dollars and 13 over 100 cents.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, the other day, the other day I went to the post office and I I think I had done something um where I had done the automatic postage.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'd use that little machine to to mail a box, and then when the woman weighed it, she said that my postage was six cents short and I paid six cents with a credit card.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: You should have written them a check.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: So so would you write the squiggly line?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: You write no dollars and six.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Would you write six or zero six overall?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Zero six, yeah.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't want to, I don't want to add a zero after it or uh no, but it's you'd write, oh yeah, and then you'd have to write the squiggly line so nobody writes and a million dollars.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Plus a million dollars.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder if you're the bank and you ever got a check that's for four dollars and thirty-eight cents and a million dollars if you'd get suspicious or if you just have to cash it.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Just say that's that's enough of that.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's the squiggly line error.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, so checks, um, you know how long a check is good for before it goes void?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Boy, I I remember that I used to get checks from my grandparents, and if I didn't cash them, you know, like for two dollars or whatever, and if I didn't cash it in time, I'd I'd get a they'd call my parents or they'd write a nasty letter to me and ask me why I haven't cashed the check.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna guess 120 days.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh six months.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Six months is the standard.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: According to the United States Uniform Commercial Code.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: A bank is not obligated to pay a check that is more than six months old.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: But they can.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: They can.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: They can cash a check after six months.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's discretionary.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: And and checks that are more when they're more than six months old, you know what they're called?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Delinquent?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: Stale dated.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, stale, I like that.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Stale dated checks, yeah.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Did you ever have the checks with the little carbon copy behind?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, yeah, and then you'd use that to balance your checkbook.
• 11:47
  unknown: Yeah.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: I I used to do that.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: I used to balance a checkbook.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like I had a little ledger and you'd put in what you spent and all that.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: But where that came in handy, and and I agree with you, because I have written some checks in the past, and then like somebody holds on to it for weeks or months, and then all of a sudden, like you forget about it, and then they go cash it, and then like you're delinquent because you you like, oh, I forgot I wrote that guy a check for 60 bucks.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there's a lot of places now that don't take checks anymore.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, Target does not take checks, Whole Foods, I didn't know Aldi, Old Navy, Lulumon.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, but you know where you can still write a check anytime you want?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: In in the grocery store.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Walmart.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: And boy, being behind somebody with a checkbook just right everything, just go it's uh it's a grinding halt.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, yep.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: And and then and then they asked the then they asked the clerk to go fetch him some cigarettes.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: They never have a pen.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they, yeah, it's it's don't run into that too much anymore, though.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right now.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm gonna say I don't I don't miss writing checks, but I do think it's a bit of a lost art.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Would you say it's a a dead end?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely, definitely a dead end.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's something that'll never come back.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank God.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Old lady in line, writing checks one at a time.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Wrinkles on her face, she's lost in her own face.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Groceries on the belt, I can't tell how she felt.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And still in the last site, it's just it's not classic.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: She's got that stuff with stuff in the stuff you're gonna do.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Manager shakes his hand for lady lost and hostess.