I usually make handful of small charitable donations at the end of the year.
I’m not entirely sure why. As a kid, I was reasonably religious, and considered it a duty. Now I’m not (a kid, or religious). Yet I still consider it a duty. For sure, I don’t get any warm fuzzy feelings from it (Post #1693: The Life Table … ).
As the twig is bent, I guess.
I often regret it. Not due to the money. Due to the endless stream of followup emails, calls, junk mail, and (increasingly) texts asking for more. I don’t so much begrudge being pestered by the entities that I actually gave money to. Much. I expect that. It’s that giving money inevitably gets me on some general-circulation list of suckers, and I then get a deluge of request from causes I’ve never even heard of.
So this year, I kept it old-school. For any non-trivial donations, I sent checks, through the U.S. mail. No cover letter. No email address. No phone. No dealing with those annoying pleas to cover the credit card fee or leave a tip, on top of the donation. Just a check, folded over, in an envelope. Pretty sure they’ll cash it, regardless of how I send it. And I figure, if they’re going to sell my name and contact info, I should at least make them work for it.
It was both oddly satisfying and oddly jarring, which gave me cause to reflect.
Some thoughts on sending spit to my favorite charities.
Accept no substitutes
First off, I’m using up an old box of business envelopes, the kind with moisture-activated glue on the flaps. And, as is traditional for my generation, without hesitation, or even bothering to think about it, I simply lick the flap, then seal the envelope.
Kids these days a) for sure don’t write checks, b) may never have actually sent anything via U.S. mail, and c) likely would find it both odd and frankly gross to lick something, then send it to a stranger.
And, objectively, sure, they have a point. And, to be clear, you could seal those gummed envelopes using a sponge or finger dampened with tap water. But I’ve been doing it with spit all my adult life. I see no reason to stop now. Not, at least, until I run down that stock of old envelopes. Or the next pandemic hits, despite the fact that it does not appear to be possible to spread pathogens this way (e.g., reference).
Mint envelopes
Source: Etsy
Just in passing — because younger generations likely won’t believe this — this practice was so common that you could buy flavored envelopes. With mint being the most common one. And nobody thought it was the least bit odd.
While “gummed closure” envelopes are still widely sold, Bon Appétit claims that flavored envelopes are a thing of the past. Mint envelopes from mainstream manufacturers are now relegated to the on-line graveyards of obsolete goods (here’s an offering, on Etsy), but they are still available as a novelty item (e.g., from Flavorlope).
I won’t even get into licking postage stamps, except to say that a) is a scratch-n-sniff U.S. postage stamp really coming ahead on the whole postage-as-food concept, and b) in Belgium, apparently you can still buy chocolate-flavored stamps.
Will “checking account” go the way of “cigarette lighter socket”?
Source: Analysis of data from the Federal Reserve. This only refers to checks cleared by the Federal Reserve, and does not account checks cleared by private commercial clearing entities.
My children literally did not believe me when I said that the proper term for the 12V power outlet in a car is “cigarette lighter socket”. It is the last artifact of the days when all cars came with built-in ashtrays, because most adults smoked most of the time, and that included smoking cigarettes while driving.
In the modern world, the plugs for those 12V power sockets in cars are both comically large and bizarrely complex. The end pin is spring-loaded to make contact with the “hot” terminal of the socket. To connect them, you have to shove a couple of inches of plug into the socket. They are completely unlike any other modern low-voltage plug. And they only have that size and construction because, once up on a time, the thing you plugged into that power outlet became a red-hot metal coil, when in use. True fact.
In a similar vein, neither my daughter nor my son has ever written a check. Neither has an account for which they own physical paper-copy checks. Yet both of them have “checking accounts”, meaning, deposit accounts from which they may demand withdrawals, at any time, in any amount up to the current balance in the account. It’s just that all of their withdrawals are done electronically.
If cigarette lighter sockets can be renamed power outlets, at what point will “checking accounts” become “debit card accounts”? Near as I can tell, that’s the only way anybody under age 30 ever uses them.
Heck, paper checks are no longer even physically “cleared” any more. Historically, they’d literally ship the paper check back to the bank of origin, and eventually, back to the person who wrote them, as a “cancelled check”, that is, marked as already having been paid. But these days, “cancelled checks” no longer exist. Clearing (at least, clearing by the Federal Reserve) is done strictly with electronic images of the paper checks. So, ultimately, payment by check is also payment in electronic format. It’s just that you can start the process off with a physical paper check.
Wanna bet they’ll still take your money?
Every charity now discourages checks. Donation has become synonymous with on-line donation. Clicking the donation link immediately takes you to some (non-standard) form used for accepting your credit card/debit card/PayPal donation.
But they’re all willing to take your money in almost any format, including by check. You just have to look. So don’t be put off by the lack of a paper check option, as you click the donation link on website. Of the charities of interest to me, 100% of them have at least a P.O. box to which they will grudgingly allow you to give them money by check.
On-line donation forms are inferior
And in the spirit of grudging, I have found that almost all on-line charitable donation forms are inferior to typical commercial vendor payment forms. And I can’t quite figure out why. Charities seem perfectly willing to give up 2+ percent of your donation in the form of a credit-card processing fee. But somehow they can’t be bothered to pay for the software that will auto-fill your address in, once you start to write it. Or at least fill in city and state, based on ZIP code.
Nope, you have to type every character, of every bit, of your address. As if it somehow cost them oodles of cash to buy any commercial system that will do that for you. For the privilege of accepting your money. Makes no sense whatsoever, to me.
The amount of information required to donate on-line is non-standard
Source: The SHQ-6, from “Appreciation of humor is decreased among patients with Parkinson’s disease”, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.parkreldis.2011.09.004
For non-deductible donations to political candidates, I understand why they ask certain questions. It’s the law, so that we can pretend that our elected Federal officials are not for sale to the highest bidder.
Some charities allow you to give on-line by supplying only name and address (and credit card). They then supply an acknowledgement page which you may save or print, to provide a record for the IRS, should you ever be audited.
Others refuse to allow you to donate on-line unless you cough up a valid(-looking) email address and phone. If you try to give them money, while leaving those mandatory fields blank, their software will rebuke you and return to the form, rather than graciously accept your donation.
And yet, all of them will accept a check, which requires neither an email address nor a phone number. So, clearly, they don’t actually need either piece of information in order to accept your money. They need it to make it more efficient for them to go after you for more money. Or to sell your contact information to others.
Hey, I can still do cursive, and it’s fast
Source: Clipartlibrary.com
My final observation from this holiday season is that a) I am still capable of doing cursive writing, b) it’s surprisingly fast, once you’ve gotten back into the groove, and c) I can write a check faster than I can fill in most on-line forms.
(OK, I cheat on some of the capitals. A proper cursive capital Q, for example, looks like the number 2. Which makes no sense. I’m not sure anyone would recognize an actual, done-to-spec cursive capital Q in a hand-written document.)
Depending on which sources you care to believe, cursive writing is either disappearing from public school curricula, or making a comeback in public school curricula. So I can’t say which.
All I can say for sure is that, other than signing my name to the random medical or legal form, the only time I routinely use cursive writing is in this year-end charitable giving exercise.
The crazy thing about flowing cursive writing is that it’s like playing a musical instrument. Mechanically, it’s all learned reflexes and muscle memory. You don’t have to think about the details. Sure, you can write it tediously, one character at a time, as if you were doing calligraphy.
But at 65 years of age, it’s somehow encouraging to see that I can still do actual on-the-fly handwriting. I can’t (fill-in-the-blank here), but at least I can still write my own name.
For now.
