Paying Bills

Gold

I get my internet connection from Ziply Fiber. I consider the price to be fairly reasonable - forty odd dollars a month. I got a notice this week that if I sign up for paperless billing they would knock $10 off my monthly bill. Cool, I can go for that. Normally I am adverse to having people suck money out of my checking account, but that's how I pay all my utility bills, so what's more piglet at the trough?

Got signed up for that, now I need to cancel the automatic payments I have set up at my bank. Point and click and scroll. I can find everything except how to cancel this automatic payment. I finally call my daughter and she points and clicks and in two seconds she has found it and boom! It's canceled.

I suspect businesses that run active websites keep changing things because they need to have people on hand to keep an eye on things, and if they don't have something for them to do they are liable to get bored and they might start looking for trouble, and that's the last thing we want. So every six weeks they revise the web site and anybody who was used to the old way gets to spend time finding their way around the new website.

I also got a refund check from my insurance company for $1.25. That's one dollar and twenty-five cents. I almost threw it in the trash, but then I realized that it probably cost the insurance company ten dollars to mail that check to me, so now I feel obligated to deposit it and close the circle. So I photographed the check using the camera in my phone, pressed the Share button, selected upload to Google Photos. Go to my computer, open Google Photos, open the images and crop them. Check the image size, they are like four mega pixels. Check with my bank, maximum image size is two MP. Cannot rescale them using Photos, but I can using the Chromebox imaged editor, so I download them, rescale them and upload them to the bank. The amount of time I spent doing this probably matches the ten dollars the insurance company spent so the scales are balanced and karma is preserved. 

I probably could have done all this from my phone, but there are only a few things I am comfortable doing with my phone, and anything having to do with money is not one of them. I also like having buttons that I can push. Touchscreens are amazing, but half the time it gets it wrong and then I have to spend extra time and concentration correcting it. Give me a $10 keyboard and a 20 inch display any day.