Liv­ing in a nation which prides itself on the con­sump­tion of money and the effi­ciency in which we reck­lessly spend it on friv­o­lous items, spend­ing money is no real chore for most of us. When the mighty debit card rolled around sup­ported by tele­phones to make the task of tak­ing your money away eas­ier and faster than ever, the check has fallen to the wayside.

That’s not too great of a shame, really. I was reminded of this at lunch today in Bre­mer­ton. The café down­stairs makes these won­der­ful pizza wraps that they only charge four dol­lars for—quite a steal for some­thing filled with cheese, sauce, sausage and other such mate­ri­als that will kill you in 50 years. Cig­a­rettes are arguably bet­ter for you than this food item. But I digress, while wait­ing to pay for my order, a woman in line ahead decided that she wanted to pay for her $5.15 pur­chase not with cash or an elec­tronic card, but with a check. Not only did she refuse to start writ­ing the check until the total was announced, but insisted on writ­ing it in her ledger before mov­ing after the trans­ac­tion. To give this whole episode an igno­min­ious end­ing, she finally stepped aside with a “your turn!” before she fell into the hole that I was visu­al­iz­ing sud­denly opened up beneath her.

This is the moral and eth­i­cal equiv­a­lent of walk­ing into a store, select­ing a box of three dol­lar cold med­i­cine, and instead of pay­ing with the $20 bill in your wal­let, haul­ing out the large bag of coins from your pocket and count­ing out the three hun­dred and twenty four pen­nies, while think­ing that this is some­how nor­mal. At the end of this episode this imag­i­nary per­son would also pro­jec­tile vomit on the checker and per­son behind them in line just for good mea­sure before shoot­ing them both in the leg.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still like the idea of a check. If I go out and buy a 56” plasma HDTV to watch grown men hit each other for money, I don’t want to spend mul­ti­ple thou­sands by sim­ply hand­ing the per­son a small plas­tic card and then sign­ing my name on some shiny piece of paper. If I’m going to spend more than some peo­ple make in a life­time, I want to write out the total in two dif­fer­ent spots—one numer­i­cal and the other in full. I want to take my time and make it seem that I care­fully con­sider my pur­chases. I want to make sure I really do have that much in the bank. I want to make the peo­ple behind me wait in line look­ing at my awe­some new piece of crap that will break in 5–10 years. And that’s what a check should be for.

Not for some whore­bag who decided it would be amus­ing to pay for a cheap lunch with a check.