And then there were none

One trend in the past few years is the elimination of printed paper bills, those things that used to arrive in your mail box every month. The San Jose Water Company was one of the last holdouts in this, and even they've finally made the move to electronic bills, so that I now write a total of ZERO checks per month.

This move to electronic bills has probably had some negative affects for some people, however. I remember talking to a person in the finance department of Cincinnati Gas and Electric several years ago who told me about how they had people whose job it was to just take care of the checks that were mailed to the wrong place. Apparently lots of people would accidentally mail the check for their utility bill to the phone company, for example, and each of the companies that sent out lots of monthly bills had people in their finance department whose job it was to correct this error.

With the increasing use of electronic bills, I'd guess that lots of those jobs have disappeared.