Icing on the cake

I get paid on the last business day of the month. I give myself a monthly allowance in my checking account, and on payday I log into my account online to move over anything that might be leftover in checking from last month's budget into the savings account. While I'm there, I take a look at whether/when the checks I've written so far have cleared. The one from the Embroiderer's Guild for my yearly dues hasn't cleared yet, but I'm not surprised. The treasurer must only go to the bank once a month or something. But another check cleared awfully late. I am surprised by it and a little bit angry.

My rent check is due to the office by the fifth business day of the month. Normally it clears by the seventh or eighth, right after it gets deposited. Both banks are local, and all this stuff is done by computer now, so it goes much quicker than it did when I was in high school--it's almost instantaneous, particularly if the check was deposited in the morning.

This month my rent check didn't clear until March 28. That's last Friday.

Good grief! Twenty-three days after I gave it to them they finally decide to do something with it? I click on the link from my bank to see a scanned-in PDF file of the check. Date stamp from the landlord's bank was indeed dated 3/28/2008, so it wasn't some computer screw up. Our guy never made it to the bank until the end of the month. Either that, or he misplaced my check for three weeks. He must have listed it in his records as received, because I didn't get any letters about late rent.

I guess this just emphasizes that the current management is slowly slipping downhill, and I really, really need to get out of here.