Thursday, December 4, 2014

Mangled Paychecks

When Mike and I got married, he had an account with a local credit union.  I used a bank for my savings and checking accounts.  After several months, we merged our accounts to his credit union due to the savings from lower fees.  We were even able to keep our account with the credit union when we moved because they had just merged with another credit union that had offices in the town where Mike works.

The small town where we live doesn't have an office for our credit union, so Mike does almost all of the kid's banking when on his lunch hour.  Madelyn delivers papers and gets paid by check every two weeks.  She signs the checks and hands them to Mike, who promptly puts them in his back pocket for safe keeping.Unfortunately, it's not a very safe location.  Two of Madelyn's checks went through the laundry over the last few months.  She had to go into the paper office with the shreds of her paycheck and ask if they could reissue the checks.  The secretary and the newspaper laughed the first two times, but when it happened a few weeks ago, she wasn't quite as amused.

Madelyn was so embarrassed that it took her a month before she returned to pick up her three paychecks. She signed the checks and handed them to Mike who took them to work safely stowing them in the back pockets of his work slacks.  It was a busy day at work and he wasn't able to get away for a lunch break and forgot the checks.  One of the girls helpfully put a load of dark clothes through the wash for me and (you know where this is going.) 

He called me from work and remembered that the checks were in his slacks.  I raced to the washer and opened the door.  The checks were soaked but hadn't been through the spin cycle yet.  I carefully peeled them apart and set them on my sewing table to dry.  The edges of the checks ended up slightly mangled, but all the numbers were clearly visible.

Mike finally took the wonky checks to the credit union to cash.  The teller had to reinsert the checks several times before the machine was able to read them.  Actually, it took over 15 minutes to read two of the checks.  The teller looked at Mike and asked if it would be possible for his to get the check reissued.  Mike just shook his head no and the overworked teller returned to sending the battered check through the reader.  Eventually, it was able to get the necessary information off the check.  As the teller was handing Mike the money and slip she said, "Thanks Tim,  See you soon."

She had listed the checks on someone else's account.  Mike felt terrible.  He handed her back the receipt and explained that he wasn't Tim.  The teller was frustrated and explained that she could transfer the transactions through his account, but she wasn't sure what she would do with the cash that would be subtracted from the cash count on her drawer.  Mike left her musing with the problem. 

Yesterday, while doing laundry, I found invoices for customers in the back pocket of his work slacks.  I may sew all his back pockets closed.  It would make life a lot easier for everybody.

1 comment:

Ewe said...

I check every single pocket before doing laundry. We've just had too many things happen that are too expensive to not do that. We have direct deposit now, but before that we washed paychecks. We had to replace a washer when a boy put rocks in his pockets and I washed those pants. And the list goes on. My husband is really good about checking his pockets but I still occasionally find something that I am so glad I didn't wash. Most recently it was a melted candy kiss in ds#3's pockets!