Check Designs

My daughter has always been industrious. She started working a paper route when she was twelve years old. At sixteen she began working at the local nursing home as a personal care attendant. She had talked about being a nurse since she was a very young child. She enjoyed the job at the nursing home and saved most of the money she made. She volunteered to work so many shifts that she did not have spare time to spend the money she was earning. She started college last year so she needed to have a checking account. She was excited when she placed the order for her first check designs. She went to the banks website and looked through the extensive list of check designs to find the perfect one. I did not know that there was such an extensive selection. We order our check blanks from a discount company because they are cheaper than the bank. I explained this to my daughter, but she said she received her first two hundred checks free for signing up for a new account.

When the checks arrived in the mail there was an invoice attached for twenty five dollars. My daughter had been choosing from a group of check designs that were considered an upgrade from the basic checks that were in the free group. She was upset about spending the extra money because she felt she had been tricked. It was a good first lesson about reading the small print that comes with free offers. The check designs that she had chosen were of jungle animals. The checks were very pretty, but the background was quite dark.

I accompanied my daughter to the campus prior to the fall semester starting so we could look at the book list and buy the books in advance so she could avoid the long lines that occur the first few days of classes. My daughter is very independent and it is important to her to pay for as much of her education as possible. She did receive several scholarships from high school as well as one from the nursing home where she works. The books she needed to purchase were for her general education classes. She was able to find a used math book and a used humanities book. They had a used biology book, but she wanted to purchase this book new because of going into the medical field. She felt this would be a book that would be used as an on-going reference book through her education and career.
The checkout line was long and moving very slowly. We found out as we neared the cashier that the credit/debit card machine was not working so each transaction needed to be keyed in by hand. The clerk said that they would take a check because the check reader/verifier was working. My daughter proudly dug out her book of new check designs. She wrote out the check. When the clerk tried to verify it he received an error message that the background was too dark to read.

My daughter encountered this same problem at other stores. She ordered new check blanks with standard check designs. Her first experience with a free offer was a great learning experience.