@Real Music,
Thirty years ago, we all carried around checkbooks which we used to pay everything from church tithes, to rent, to groceries, to dry cleaning. These checkbooks contained little rectangles called
checks which contained our bank account number in plain sight.
The security of these checks consisted of two things. First was the idea that if you write your name quickly or stylishly enough, no one could copy it well enough to fool a 17 year old cashier or an overworked immigrant contractor. This, of course, was
ridiculous, it is meaningless as a security measure. But we all believed in it because we had too.
We needed checks back then because cash was difficult to come by. There were no ATMs... you had to go talk to a live person during bank business hours. Most of us would withdraw enough cash once a week based on what we expected to spend. But for the rest of our expenditures, there were checks.
And once a month, we would go through an always annoying and sometimes painful ritual we called
"balancing" our checkbook. We all kept track of how much money we thought
should be in our account. But when we got our account statement in the mail from the bank saying how much as
actually in the account, we would have to go line by line to figure out why the numbers were different. Often this was because the checks hadn't made it through the slow financial system yet to be reflected in our accounts. Sometimes it was our mistake.
And yes...
there was check fraud. It wasn't that hard for people to simply fake a signature or simply copy a bank number. You had to carefully check your statement each month to make sure someone hadn't done this. And... often this meant spending time on the phone with a tired bank employees going line by line over your account.
The good old days weren't always good.... (Billy Joel).
