I love technology. And also I hate technology. Love/hate. Yeah.
And also I’m still working the details on my new financial order. Regular readers will recall I recently lost my shit-shoveling gig, which put thirty or forty bucks into my pocket every week for years. That was money I could always count on, and it was cash, and my use of plastic was minimal.
Plastic, you say? Uncle Joel, you been holding out on us? Who on earth would give you a credit card?
And of course the answer is nobody in this life. But though technically I don’t have a bank account, I do kinda-sorta have a debit card. Don’t look at it too closely, it’ll make you sterile.
Anyway, all of a sudden I was getting paid from out of state via Paypal, which goes into that account, accessed by that debit card, and it’s a pain. It became additionally painful this morning without notice at the checkout of the local food market, when the card was rejected.
Uh? I know damn sure there’s money in that account, because what’s left of the whole building fund is in there. But no, card rejected.
It took me a second to recall that, for a convoluted and boring reason, I had asked the person who handles my vast financial empire to order a new debit card. He/She did so. And of course the financial institution issuing the new card – which is hundreds of miles away from this desk and not accessible by mail – canceled the old one. The one that just fruitlessly slid through the food market’s card reader.
I genuinely didn’t see that coming.
Fortunately, two weekends ago I received a care package with a few twenties in it, so I got out of the checkout line without excessive embarrassment and I even have enough left for one last gasoline buy. But I won’t be buying groceries for a couple of weeks.
Is this an emergency? Of course it isn’t. I could go three weeks without even rationing my preferred drinking water. I could go months without rationing food, though I’d run out of the good stuff before then and the local cottontails had better watch their P’s and Q’s. Don’t be ridiculous, is it an emergency. No.
But it was unexpected. Even after all these years some of my arrangements are still improvisations, brilliant and … otherwise. And sometimes they come tumbling down on me without warning. It’s good to have backup, and I just think it’s funny as hell that things have run so smoothly, money-wise, that one of the backups that never crossed my mind was cash.
Joel…you used……CASH!!!!! TPTB won’t like that.