Payment on Stone Tablet Via Pony Express

The Lunacy of Paper Checks and Waiting Periods in the Digital Age

I’ve never typed out a text with a typewriter and mailed it to my clients, and I doubt they’d appreciate it if I did. I doubt they’d work with me for very long if I insisted we correspond through the physical postal service instead of via email. So why do some companies still find it acceptable to claim an inability to conduct electronic transfers of funds?

Back when I was a budding young freelance/contract translator, still wet behind the ears and tickled pink that someone would pay me to work in my boxers while watching M*A*S*H*, I had to accept that my job required that I wait for clients to get around to sending paper checks out by mail. Back then, that didn’t seem completely unreasonable, since the world was still in what it seemed to me were the beginning stages of electronic transfer of funds.

Back then, I still had to go to the bank to receive transfers from foreign clients. Back then, I was still sending out paper checks to the other translators who worked for me. Back then, a lot of people were still bringing home paper payroll checks and making sure they took enough cash out of the bank on Friday afternoons to get them through the weekend.

But this is the digital age, people. My Packers tickets are searched, located, purchased, delivered, and presented at the stadium on my cell phone. It has to have been more than five years ago now that people were depositing checks by taking cell phone pictures of them. Why am I still waiting for the mailman to deliver me a paper check?

I’m getting ahead of myself, so allow me to start from the beginning. I’ve recently re-entered the full-time freelance world, only this time as a writer rather than as a translator. For the most part, it’s been going surprisingly well. I’m the permanent, exclusive blogger for more than a half dozen corporate sites; I write on a repeating but less frequent basis for a number of other clients; and I have been easily picking up more one-off gigs than I can comfortably handle to fill out the rest of my…