“Can you go to the cash machine and draw out forty quid, please?” asked my long-suffering partner, wife and carer.
“Sure,” I replied.
We are having some work down at the house and some stuff is being delivered today. And we have to pay in cash because, I imagine, the delivery man’s card reader isn’t working. I can’t think of another explanation. Anyway, so off I went to our local Tesco to draw some money out. When I arrived at the cash machine, my first thought was this: “What the hell do I do now?”
I can’t remember the last time I carried cash with me. There’s just no point. Very, very occasionally, I’ve had a problem where admission to a local football match was by cash only and so they wouldn’t let me in. Other than that, it’s been a real gift to not arse around with cash.
In my previous job, working with people who had an acquired brain injury, I was forever standing next to people who were drawing out cash from supermarket cash machines, carefully avoiding look at the screen or the keyboard. I’d ask them why on earth they needed to draw out cash to pay for shopping when the very card they were using could cover the payment, basically cutting out the middle man? I never really got an answer beyond, “I prefer cash and I don’t trust cards”, which is entirely fair. And speaking anecdotally, I see people at cash machines all the time. Presumably not all of them have acquired brain injuries?
I got to the machine and thought, “What the hell do I do now?” In the event, it was very easy. Stick the card in, try to remember my PIN number, put the amount I want on the keyboard and wait. And there it was: actual money. It felt so, well, yesterday.
An old friend of mine has a very different opinion on the cashless society. It’s all a big conspiracy run by the lizards from David Icke’s fevered imagination to control our minds by…er…getting us to pay for stuff with phones and cards. Probably the same lizards who invent vaccines for Covid-19 which doesn’t really exist. We have agreed to differ on this one since I prefer to deal in facts rather than bonkers conspiracy theories.
The sooner we can get rid of cash the better. It’s just something unnecessary to carry around if you ask me. Quite how you get round ‘cash-in-hand’ jobs which we NEVER use, oh no, is a problem I’ll worry about when cash no longer exists.
