A pet peeve
Bookworm on Jun 23 2008 at 7:39 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
Am I the only person who finds it incredibly irritating when there is a long, long line to discover that the person in front of me, who must have known for quite a while that she was going to pay by check, takes out her check book and starts filling in the information only after the total has been rung up?
I seldom pay by check, but when I do, if I’ve been standing in line, I use that time to fill in the date, payee and, sometimes, my signature. That way, once I know the total, I can swiftly fill in the amount and be done with it. Why do these people always act as if it’s a surprise that they need to fill in that information?
Grrrrrr.
Email This Post To A Friend
15 Responses to “A pet peeve”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I’m probably in that category. In any case, I’ll plead guilty. In all honesty, I’d fill it out if they had some place to set my purse down, and if I could rest the checkbook on same place in order to start writing it. They don’t usually supply a place until you’re on the other side of the cashier…
Costgo - when it was Price Club - had two places to write checks. Now it’s just one place - on the out side of the cashier…
I usually sigh loudly and start talking about the neat gadget called a debit card.
As a Chicago area resident and a user of the,seemingly, myriad toll roads, it always amazed me when people pulled up to the toll booth and then began fumbling for money.
Fortunately the toll authority modernized with electronic toll payment and now I can motor on without stopping.
Oh, yes! I started working in my dad’s drugstore when I was 14, so it’s been a big pet peeve of mine for a long time. ( That, along with folks who came in right at closing time to browse. )
These must be the same people who when coming in the gates at our local military bases, get to the guard and THEN start looking around their car for their IDs as if they’ve never had to show ID before.
Since BW already said she in describing the person hauling out the checkbook at the register…
In my experience, it usually is a female who realizes at the last possible moment that check-writing is a time consuming event…get out eyeglasses, put them on, fill out the spaces, yes i have ID, wait that’s the wrong ID, etc.
The debit card idea is a godsend to the bank, but not to the customer since transfer of funds is immediate. It doesn’t give the customer the usual float.
Filling out as many blanks in the check - except the signature - before reaching the cashier is the smoothest way I’ve found, and it doesn’t tempt customers behind me to shoot me!
Jack
There’s no such thing as a “float” anymore. Those checks are the same as debit cards, and when they are put through the cash register now, the funds are immiadiately taken from the bearer’s account. And if they are not done like that at point of sale, they are put through clearinghouses within 24 hours.
So that 4-5 day float is no more than a day anymore.
If you want a float, do what I do: use your credit card, and pay it off in full every month.
Heh…Duchess…
Office Depot (and somewhere else I don’t remember) now runs the check through their cash register and then hands it back to you. _That_ one really surprised me!
Nevertheless, a friend who is cashing a work check for another friend who doesn’t have a bank account says her bank won’t clear funds for 10 working days. In other words…_they_ get to use the float - even if they won’t let us use it!
It doesn’t just apply to checks, or cards - even people paying cash seem to wait until they’ve been rung up before they start rummaging for their wallets!
It’s as though there are a great many people to whom it comes as a surprise that they’re expected to pay when they buy something.
This post made me think of a Darkwing Duck episode where Darkwing Duck says, “I am the check writer in the cash only line.” He had all kinds of great phrases like that which were supposed to impress the good guys and intimidate the bad.
Yes! It does peeve me; and as the fearless JackCoupal pointed out it seems to be a female thing. As to the excuse of there not being a place to write, well duh? Once the cashier starts ringing up your stuff, you are THERE, so get busy. Still, women will wait until the cashier is finished before they start looking for their checkbook, or digging around for cash.
While, I am on the subject. I have never figured why women, who are the main victims, are also the worst offenders when it comes to blocking aisles in busy stores. Carts are left willy nilly; conversations persist at choke points. A little common sense and thoughtfulness goes a long way.
I agree with the Bookworm. Credit cards are a great conveniences and very efficient shopping tools–if you pay them off monthly. I wonder why people fool with checks at the cash register or hike into the gas station to pay, when that modern miracle, the credit card, is available. (I remember well the first time I used a Visa card in Europe and thought that wonders would never cease. That pleasure was exceeded only by the experience of an ATM machine in southern Mexico referring to me by name, in English). Sometimes, it is painful when the bill comes in, but I seldom pay in cash if the tab exceeds about $20, and seldom carry more than $50 to $100 in cash, unless I am traveling. Actually, I often prepare myself emotionally when I know the bill will be extra large by monitoring my account on line. That softens the final blow a bit.
My pet peeve, somewhat related, is COUPONS! They (ALWAYS females, I’m sorry to say) hand off their wads of coupons, half of which are expired and the other half for products they didn’t buy.
I think I should get a “no coupon” discount just for not wasting everyone’s time. This includes the calling for a manager because the customer is in a fight with the cashier over an expired coupon.
Most people in the human race, sadly, can’t think past beyond 60 seconds into the future.
Long term planning in years and what not is in that little abstract section of the brain for calculating abstract values.
We don’t actually count the days or the seconds until our goal of 10 or 20 years have passed. It’s an abstract, meaning it’s not part of our biological clocks.
Perhaps people in line have just put the time of checkout into their abstract portion of the brain and then time passes, because time is eternal in abstraction, and suddenly they are there.
My pet peeve is people who block traffic in the parking lot waiting for someone to pull out so they can take their parking place. Everyone else has to wait for these idiots so that they can avoid a few seconds worth of walking (when they could probably use the exercise to begin with). They must think a lot of themselves to believe their convenience is important enough to burden everyone else.