much ado about nothing

Things can get quite troublesome if your cheque gets lost after you’ve dropped it into the quick deposit box at the bank:

1. When it's not cleared after a long time, you call up the bank and ask it to check.
2. It calls back after a few days saying the cheque couldn’t be found. It then offers to send you a lost statement as proof to whoever issued you the cheque.
3. With the statement, your payer can give a stop payment order to the issuing bank before reissuing a new cheque.
4. Cancelling the lost cheque will incur charges, but you can send the invoice to the bank with whom you deposited the cheque.
5. Out of “goodwill”, the bank will subsidise you half the charges (because no one can prove who lost the cheque).

This was what I learned after realising that a cheque I’d gotten early last month from my company is still not cleared yet. I had subsequently called up the bank asking it to search for the cheque. It certainly isn’t comforting to know that such a thing could happen every time you do a quick deposit, and the trouble you have to go to if it gets lost. And for my case (this depends on the issuing bank), the fee for cancelling the lost cheque is $25! Imagine if the original cheque is, say, just $10 – cancelling it would’ve been utterly pointless.

Just as well, then, that after all the hassle of calling the bank, checking with my company admin and all, I found the “lost” cheque sitting pretty inside my wallet amidst a stack of receipts. Oh is such a bloody nincompoop sometimes, ha!