I'm on paperless billing and autopay for most of the bills, so I don't always look at the emails when they come in, just store them in a Bills folder in my email. The other day I looked at the phone bills that had just come in, and one of them was for a phone account I closed in June. It was for one cent. And I couldn't pay it online because there is a $20 minimum. I'm sure I could figure out how to write a check for one cent and mail it to them, but I didn't like the idea. I called and they said it was some tax they forgot to bill me back last summer and they would remove the charge.

Up until the day he died in 2002, my dad typed all his checks and correspondence on an old manual Olivetti typewriter. He typed his correspondence on memo paper with carbons. He had a computer, but never used it for business purposes.

Out of sentiment, I kept that old typewriter in the office for many years. Then I moved it to the garage for awhile, and I finally got rid of it after thinking about all those compulsive hoarders drowning in stuff they don't need. It was hard to let it go because it was such an integral part of my memories of my dad, but it's not like it's the only thing of his I had left.

Although I do use a computer for all my business stuff, I don't print checks with it, I write them out by hand. When I have to write a large check, I have found that it takes less room on the line to write the dollars this way:

Fifteen hundred thirty-nine and no/100

rather than One thousand five hundred thirty-nine and no/100.

Try it some time.

I think if I was writing a check for a penny, I would write Zero dollars and 01/100 in the written line and cross out the printed "Dollars" at the end of that line.


This is not Eloise, but looks something like her. She would not put up with this.