It sits there on my desk — like a beached whale. The world’s biggest business checkbook. Must be at least 8 feet long, and its faux-leather hides the fact that it is really a stone tablet. To lift it, I need a forklift. To use it, I need a lobotomy.
My new world brain struggles with old world accounting.
“Can’t we just pay bills online like normal people?” I ask my mother. No … I plead. I sound like a 5-year-old who wants a piece of candy. “PLEASE!!!”
“No,” I’m told. “There’s something not quite right about paying bills that way.”
And I get the idea she can’t quite figure out what is not right, but that it must involve a banking conspiracy, or the mafia, or a possible alien invasion.
“You know, it’s killing me — literally KILLING me — to write out all these checks and then …” and I have to keep myself from gagging “… address all these envelopes. I feel like I’m in the 1990s. If people find out, I’ll be ruined!”
My mother is recovering from a hip break and a fractured knee. They’ve sidelined her, and I’ve stepped in to take care of some financial tasks for her and our family business — a piece of commercial real estate we own in Tampa. She runs it … by paper. Only paper.
It’s not particularly difficult. I actually welcome doing. It’s nice to help out and a great learning experience. But I also feel like I have moved from the computer age to the Stone Age.
If there is one thing my mother and I don’t see eye-to-eye on, it’s old world accounting versus new world technology.
I don’t write checks unless someone has come to my house, pointed a bazooka at my head and then had to put the bazooka down to literally force my hand to write one. I’m an online banking nut. I can’t fathom the idea of sitting down and balancing a paper checkbook. Is this not why the Lord gave us spreadsheets?
But I have had to adapt to my mother’s system — one rooted deeply in pencils, bookkeeping paper — which looks like a bad shirt pattern from the 70s — and adding up lots of stacked numbers the old fashioned way: with sweat, wild-dog howling, never-ending erasing and the loss of bookoo brain cells.
“This is not natural,” I tell her. “Did you know the U.N. is actually considering outlawing paper accounting because it’s more cruel than sweat shops?”
“It has worked for me for all these years, and it won’t kill you to do a little math,” I’m told.
But I think it WILL kill me. Or at least addressing all of those … gag, gag … envelopes. I’ve turned into a financial Neanderthal.
I’m getting it done somehow. It’s taking all of my strength, but I’m making it work … thanks to a few God-given spreadsheets working hard behind the scenes. (Now if only I can figure out how to print some 21st century address labels.)