When I got home, my wife was waiting.
"Where did you go?"
"Couldn't sleep. Went for a walk." Not a complete lie. I could not sleep, technically, since the time I woke up with a start, realizing there were bills to be paid and that I had about half an hour to pay them in, before fines kicked in. I stuffed the bills into my pocket, wore my shoes and sneaked out. I was hoping she'd be still be asleep by the time I returned. That way she'd never know of the last-minute payments.
This bill payment is a bone of contention between us.
We have two types of bills to be paid: Those that can be paid online, requiring me to be at an internet connection with bank login devices handy before midnight on certain dates and those that need me to hare down to a machine with the deadline fast approaching.
For some undefined reason, I cannot pay bills in advance. I have tried, and I have failed. A number of times.
It just doesn't feel right to pay the money when it doesn't need to be paid for another two weeks. Or ten days. Or seven days. Or three days. Or till tomorrow.
I feel the temporal gap between me receiving the bill and the last day for payment written in it as such a vast chasm as to be unbridgeable by the mere passing of time. I can't put the reason why I do not want to pay the credit card company or the gas company say, two days in advance.
It is definitely not the interest I earn with the bank. The princely rate that my bank pays me, compounded by the relative penury of my account deems this monthly addition to my savings to be equal to an amount, more or less, that if I were to convert to specie, I would require about half a minute's worth of work with sandpaper on a coin of any denomination. And then save the shavings, not the remnants of the coin.
Is it pride in the fact that I remember these deadlines (self-created issues, as my in-house therapist calls them)? Maybe.
Do I like being jolted awake to remember looming last dates (with me it almost always boils down to last hours and minutes) and then undertaking a sprint? Not really.
Occasionally I miss the cushion and hit the hard ground. There have been a number of reasons for that - such as the machine would not work (that one time I did not leave enough time to go to another machine), the website was under maintenance (can you believe it! that too in this day and age), the internet connection was down (these last two should actually be accepted for a deadline extension), there was a queue at the machine (three morons who could not manage their time better).
Only twice was I forced to admit that I had forgotten.
In the past my in-house therapist used to have a fit then and still does occasionally, but time and tide have mellowed her. She knows I hate all forms of exercise so if I am leaving the home and giving evasive answers, it must be a bill that needs paying.
Each time after dinner I busily and in as low key manner as possible open my laptop or wear my keds and try and push off, my wife wants to know if I am paying bills.
I nod.
Next she wants to know why I don't pay them when they come in or since I am perfectly aware of when the bills come in, why don't I set a date for paying them and make my life easier.
I nod again. This time to acknowledge the truth in the statement.
All this makes sense. Her suggestions are eminently sensible and sustainable and that is why she got to be the in-house therapist that I needed most in my life.
But it is not implementable.
I do not know why it is so.
I have tried - I once sat down a week early to pay bills. I opened my laptop and went to the web. Next thing I know the deadline was a few hours away and I was collecting pieces of paper and logging in to the bank's website.
I paid the bills that time and then I called for help to find the lost memories of the intervening six days.
I lay down on the couch. I tried to remember what had happened - at first the memories were sketchy - but my therapist is good.
Yes, a cricket game was on. I had missed most of the match but had to catch up on what happened.
No, I did not watch the highlights - I read the ball-by-ball commentary on cricinfo to get a quick view of what happened - 90 overs with comments, plays, scorecard, statistics analysis and other news, via of course, the quick check of scorecard links of past matches somehow connected to this one that are liberally sprinkled in the commentary.
Then I went to the news sites - figured out what was happening in the world in general, beyond the cricket ground.
Then I checked my e-mail and office e-mail. I wrote some replies and finally added half a cent's worth of stuff to my blog.
By this time the day was over. It was time to catch the highlights on TV and then to sleep - the peaceful sleep of one who had achieved something - I had managed to read the commentary of an entire day's play and had even managed to re-play the key moments of the test in my head.
The bills were forgotten.
They had lost the age-old battle between the important and the urgent.
This same went on for the next six days: office during the day, 'randomizer initializing' at night, till forsaking the mantle of 'important' that the bills habitually wore, they became at once, URGENT.
And then I paid them.
It just doesn't feel right to pay the money when it doesn't need to be paid for another two weeks. Or ten days. Or seven days. Or three days. Or till tomorrow.
I feel the temporal gap between me receiving the bill and the last day for payment written in it as such a vast chasm as to be unbridgeable by the mere passing of time. I can't put the reason why I do not want to pay the credit card company or the gas company say, two days in advance.
It is definitely not the interest I earn with the bank. The princely rate that my bank pays me, compounded by the relative penury of my account deems this monthly addition to my savings to be equal to an amount, more or less, that if I were to convert to specie, I would require about half a minute's worth of work with sandpaper on a coin of any denomination. And then save the shavings, not the remnants of the coin.
Is it pride in the fact that I remember these deadlines (self-created issues, as my in-house therapist calls them)? Maybe.
Do I like being jolted awake to remember looming last dates (with me it almost always boils down to last hours and minutes) and then undertaking a sprint? Not really.
Occasionally I miss the cushion and hit the hard ground. There have been a number of reasons for that - such as the machine would not work (that one time I did not leave enough time to go to another machine), the website was under maintenance (can you believe it! that too in this day and age), the internet connection was down (these last two should actually be accepted for a deadline extension), there was a queue at the machine (three morons who could not manage their time better).
Only twice was I forced to admit that I had forgotten.
In the past my in-house therapist used to have a fit then and still does occasionally, but time and tide have mellowed her. She knows I hate all forms of exercise so if I am leaving the home and giving evasive answers, it must be a bill that needs paying.
Each time after dinner I busily and in as low key manner as possible open my laptop or wear my keds and try and push off, my wife wants to know if I am paying bills.
I nod.
Next she wants to know why I don't pay them when they come in or since I am perfectly aware of when the bills come in, why don't I set a date for paying them and make my life easier.
I nod again. This time to acknowledge the truth in the statement.
All this makes sense. Her suggestions are eminently sensible and sustainable and that is why she got to be the in-house therapist that I needed most in my life.
But it is not implementable.
I do not know why it is so.
I have tried - I once sat down a week early to pay bills. I opened my laptop and went to the web. Next thing I know the deadline was a few hours away and I was collecting pieces of paper and logging in to the bank's website.
I paid the bills that time and then I called for help to find the lost memories of the intervening six days.
I lay down on the couch. I tried to remember what had happened - at first the memories were sketchy - but my therapist is good.
Yes, a cricket game was on. I had missed most of the match but had to catch up on what happened.
No, I did not watch the highlights - I read the ball-by-ball commentary on cricinfo to get a quick view of what happened - 90 overs with comments, plays, scorecard, statistics analysis and other news, via of course, the quick check of scorecard links of past matches somehow connected to this one that are liberally sprinkled in the commentary.
Then I went to the news sites - figured out what was happening in the world in general, beyond the cricket ground.
Then I checked my e-mail and office e-mail. I wrote some replies and finally added half a cent's worth of stuff to my blog.
By this time the day was over. It was time to catch the highlights on TV and then to sleep - the peaceful sleep of one who had achieved something - I had managed to read the commentary of an entire day's play and had even managed to re-play the key moments of the test in my head.
The bills were forgotten.
They had lost the age-old battle between the important and the urgent.
This same went on for the next six days: office during the day, 'randomizer initializing' at night, till forsaking the mantle of 'important' that the bills habitually wore, they became at once, URGENT.
And then I paid them.
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