not noticing the change.

Ever have the moments where you see what you’re doing, and then you realize how different it is from “the way it used to be?” I get that feeling a lot. Most recently when I thought about bill paying.

One of my memories as a lad is of Mom paying the bills a few times a month. She’d sit at the dining table and pull out a few envelopes and her checkbook and off they’d go. It never took that long, but it was long enough that I remember it as a concrete event. And it went like this for as long as I can remember.

For about as long as I’ve paid bills, I’ve only paid two bills a month. And I’m sure I could get that down to one bill, or even none if I tried. I pay my credit card and mortgage bills online each month. In typically under a minute total. All of my other bills are autopayed on my credit card. No checks. No stamps. No sitting at the table.

It’s not a big deal, and I never really thought too much about it, but it’s amazing to me how different it is from when I grew up. I wonder if when we tell our kids about writing checks this will sound as annoying and insane as when our parents told us how they had to walk everywhere through massive amounts of snow, etc as kids. Well, I never actually heard about my parents having to walk through 10 inches of snow, since you know, they grew up in India. But you get the idea.