This morning, in response to “due,” my One-Word Challenge prompt today, Teresa, over at The Haunted Wordsmith, posted this. I’m pretty sure her story was fiction, but what I’m about to relate to you here actually happened.
I was a rookie supervisor at a large insurance company and one day I got a call from the head of the Personnel Department (back then, Human Resources was known as “Personnel”) telling me that I needed to speak with one of my recently hired employees. She had apparently been going around writing a lot of bad checks.
I called Marylou into my office. She was this cute little thing who had just moved to the big city (Washington, DC) from a small town in South Carolina. I explained to her that I needed to talk with her about a serious matter. Before I even completed my sentence, tears started flowing down her adorable cheeks.
“I understand that you’ve been writing checks and that many of them have bounced,” I said. “Can you tell me why you’re writing all of these bad checks?”
“Bad checks?” she asked, her innocent eyes growing wide. “Why whatever do you mean by ‘bad checks’?”
“Well,” I said, “your checks are bouncing all over the place. You know that you can’t write a check for more than the balance you have in your checking account, don’t you?”
“Oh no,” she said, “that’s not right. One of the wonderful things about working for this company is that you get a free checking account.”
“Ah,” I said. “I think I know what the problem is, Marylou. What do you think a free checking account means?”
She smiled and said, “It means you can write all the checks you want for free.”
“Yes, you can write checks for free, but you have to have enough money in your account to cover the checks you write,”I explained. “Free checking is not the same as free money.”
The next day the Personnel Department added a “How to Manage Your Free Checking Account” to its first day new hire orientation.
This, That, and the Other 
What was her job?
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Customer service rep.
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Wow i never heard about it…very cool 😉 I want free checks & account too 🕺🕺
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Lol…this reminds me of my Aunt who didn’t know you actually had to have money in your checking account. I am laughing so hard right now because my son (just turned 14 last week) finally accepts the fact (although he still thinks it’s stupid) that you can’t just put items “on your card”. For the longest time he refused to believe that debit cards had to have money with them. The sad thing is, that all this shows is that the concept of money is unnatural, but bartering or natural resources is. Not to get political on this (so we’ll stick with economics…lol) this is why socialism and communism is more natural than capitalism. If the state produced the required goods, people would not need money. You need food–go to the store and select your goods. You need clothes–go pick them out. I remember tutoring 2nd graders on their money and they were so confused about the whole concept…wacky setup we have.
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My youngest son (22) and I were talking about money last night. The conversation started because I’ve been curious about things like bitcoin (wackier than our money). Our (national) money is sort of like a contract (not a word either of us used last night, although he used the term “I owe you” which is similar). One could owe/agree to anything… dollar bills, oranges, titanium wedding rings. But something has to enforce it. (And it seems one can’t count on bitcoin.)
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Money is a method of agreed exchange is all. It could grey rocks, hair pins, or anything at all as long as it was agreed upon by the public. Wages would be the closet thing to an IOU we see in our daily lives…lol. One of the problems with any form of exchange (including bitcoin) are the hoarders. They remove currency (ability to exchange) from the system which inflates value…especially when we were on the gold standard. Some communities found that local bartering “bucks” increases local revenue immensely. These programs are run by a central committee. Shop owners liked it because they could exchange the bucks for services or products they needed while making other business owners and community members happy.
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It’s unfortunate that so many students graduate from high school and are clueless when it comes to handling and manage money. And most parents do a lousy job at teaching their kids about it.
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Many schools are now requiring a financial management or financial life skills class, but learning how to write a check, balance a checkbook, and not take out student loans only skims the surface. It’s up to the parents to teach utilities, appointments, emergencies, etc. and they just don’t. My son has had to make his own medical and optometrist appointments since he was ten just so he would know how to do it. It’s hilarious watching him struggle to make a phone call though…people just don’t talk to other people anymore…lol.
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My second son took a course like that in high school, as an elective. My oldest one was home educated all the way through high school, and I taught him those things (I mostly, along with some helpful and fun extracurricular organized community activities). My third son left the country for New Zealand when he was a teen, as there was a combination of bad law (before the ACA passed) and a dad being a jerk at the time. His dad wanted him to be in college full time and work full time and didn’t want to help hardly at all in life. (That son is a manager over there now.) My fourth son didn’t take the money/personal finances course in high school but started studying economics there — such that he gave one of his college economics teachers a lecture, first year (and the teacher was reprimanded by the dean).
The fifth one is still in college because he spent some time joining the Army. After starting at university, he’s sorted his own way through later figuring out how to get into ROTC. He has been a dorm president and is now a happy RA in his apartment building. {Their dad has a degree in economics (among other things)… and obtained his double-bachelor via ROTC too, but doesn’t teach his offspring. Even doing taxes, he couldn’t answer questions they had (other than to recommend turbotax, which is fine). He’d say things like “do whatever you want” (on taxes), with no bearings or background information. So I was the one who clued my oldest son in on how he could get himself prepared for qualifying as to buying a house. I helped him and two of my other sons choose homes that would be good values.}
Your mention of utilities has reminded me that I was planning on moving when I had two of my “children” still living with me but one was eighteen. That one was going to have to be named on the electric bill, water, etc. In the process of relaying his information, we were told someone else was using the social security number we gave the companies. This young man had to embark on navigating to get his “identity” back, which he had accomplished in a couple months. (Meanwhile, I chose not to move for another reason relating to misrepresentation of property.) My youngest one was the only one who had a little bit of a paradigm shift when he was told he could make his own medical appointments and should. But that didn’t take long, and he was suddenly coming up with all kinds of things he hadn’t thought of doing.
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Equally true was an elderly customer who said she couldn’t possibly be overdrawn as she still had a lot of cheques left in her cheque book.
I had a ‘free’ bank account when I was staff, then a lot of banks introduced free banking if you kept a minimum balance of £100 on your account. Now as long as you stay in credit, there are no bank charges for the day to day account, unless you want to make special cable or same day payments to an account held at another bank.
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Marylou needs overdraft protection.
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Or a class in personal finances.
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They should delete one boring math course in school and teach “Handling money, credit, checkng, and what is an APR?” as a course. Then REQUIRE everyone to take it. Two semesters at least.
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I agree.
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One of my sons signed up for AP Statistics instead of the usual college-bound calculus. His principal stared at him and said, “That’s not typical.”
“I can do it, though, right?” The principal was probably dreading in his head that a parent would be breathing down his own neck about a poor choice.
But my son and I had already discussed it.
That son also developed an interest in economics (which he wouldn’t have had his first course in it been taken, if he’d even have thought of it, in college).
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I believe your comments section is getting crowded. You’re popular.
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The more the manyer.
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Manyer?
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As in “the more the merrier,” but instead of “merry,” it’s “many.”
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That’s the first I heard of it, the word not the idiom.
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