Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for September 20, 2020

Desperate time calls for desperate measure. One does what one has to do.

It’s called floating a check. I worked in a very upscale bank one summer in Beverly Hills in 1961 and some of the customers knew the float time better than us bank employees.

Loved float time. But using EFT, you can do it the day before the bill is actually due!

OK. All that’s fine, but do you remember when you had to wait for the full number of rings before you knew whether it was for you or your neighbor? Do you remember having to drive the new car no faster than 30 MPH until the engine had “worked in”? How about ordering something from a catalog? Two weeks from when you sent in the order until the (wrong) order arrived. Then two weeks after you complained before they sent you a form to fill about the problem that didn’t have an option for what the problem WAS. Then two weeks for them to reply that it wasn’t their fault. And two weeks after you sicked a lawyer on them before they agreed to send the right thing. And two weeks more for it to arrive. So if you needed a part, you had to order it more than TWO MONTHS in advance of need. Ah, those were the days!

Kiting is only OK for congressmen, as I recall.

This is obviously a rerun of an old strip. All of those things have now been replaced by “smart” phones.

Does floating a check become illegal when you write it, or when you fail to cover it in time?

Something I learned from my boss. If you ink some black marks on the check where the routing numbers are it gets kicked out of the automatic reader and has to be entered by hand. Usually gets you another day of float.

Even debit card purchases took a couple of days to process until a few years ago.

The turning point for me was the day I used my debit card in a gas pump…

Got to the bank about 10 minutes later, and that transaction was already posted… or at least, marked “pending” and subtracted from my balance.

I realised the writing was on the wall… or at least posted on my account…. no more two-day float.

I talked to a banker, and she said yes, they’d speeded up electronic processing.

If you were immediately “overdrawn” by a pending transaction, your overdraft protection would kick in, and you’d be charged the fee… then $25.

If you had no overdraft protection, you’d have a bigger pending fee, for a bounced check.

But transactions, though visible earlier that day, actually posted at midnight…

If you made a deposit before that, the overdraft wouldn’t happen, and any as-yet-unprocessed fee you’d seen would be dropped.

At my current bank, posting happens at 6AM… so if you like to (or must) live on the edge, you have till then to do an online transfer….

but of course not a live transaction at a closed bank.

The funny thing is, if you WANT that extra float time, you kind of get “punished” for being good…

In places where you’re known and trusted… like some stores where you shop a lot,

your card is recognised, and your transactions are posted instantly with the bank.

In a couple of places I’m not even asked for a PIN on small transactions… though I don’t like that cos it seems insecure.

Processing takes longer, sometimes even two days, if the electronic equipment doesn’t recognise your card…

so if you need more time, try using a different card.

It might work. LOL

It was knowingly writing a check with insufficient funds, not "the money will be there when the check clears!

And it will only get worse. There’s a video from Corning called “A day made of glass” that introduced us to all of the wonders of living in a world where all of our glass surfaces can link us into our computers. The terrifying part that got my attention is where the impossibly attractive mom of the family is brushing her teeth and an email from her boss pops up her mirror asking if she can come to an earlier meeting. What?! What if she had been on the hopper?? The day my boss can contact me when I’m taking my morning dum…er, morning constitutional will be a dark day indeed.

Illegal is a sick bird.

I kind of miss the frequent malfunctioning of TV picture and you had to go to the adjust knobs to fix it, it gave you an instant sense of accomplishment.

Kiting was fun as a kid and a game of chance as an adult…..

As far as the legality of floating a check, the worst punishment you would receive would be a $30 charge, and another, and another—if you couldn’t cover it in the next few days.

That is why most company’s give 10 day business grace period to make certain check is covered, then a penalty phase.

I have always held that mobile devices are a plot, instigated by the bosses, to tighten the bonds that hold us workers to our posts. Available and accessible to the boss 24/7.

Same goes for energy drinks. How many more hours could they get out of us if we didn’t rest because we’re all hopped up on caffeine and sugar?

Nice to be able to trade some items at some stores nowadays when problems occur with orders.

I do remember having to constantly keep Amazon from offering to buy things for me, retroactively. :)