The recent passing of my Dad and brother and all that has been required of me to execute those estates has left me reeling from many, what I will call, self-induced complications. One simple example, in days gone by the mailman would have delivered to the mailbox a bill from the water company. The receiver would have opened the envelope, written a check and returned it via postal mail. Done. Easy. Simple as dirt.

But not so in these wonderful days of more convenience thanks to computer technology.

No, in this new marvelous age that water bill will arrive via email and the receiver would process it electronically and the payment would be made with the click of a mouse. Well, assuming the receiver isn’t dead. Because if that person is dead then that email will never be received by anyone who can do a damned thing about it. Including the executor of the estate.

Processing the payment requires web addresses, usernames, and passwords. And because every ten minutes another major corporation gets hacked and all this supposedly secure payment data leaks into the ether, the advice is to have long and not easily guessed passwords. And each account should have a separate username and password to thwart said hackers. Even though we all know that doesn’t really work…

Modern society has managed to build impenetrable walls of data that can be scaled by pre-pubescent teens with nothing better to do than make trouble for the rest of us. By the way, if you disagree with my assessment to this point in my screed permit me to suggest you STFU because clearly you’re ignorant about these matters. Sorry. Can you tell I’m a little steamed?

I could write volumes about the stupidity of the situation we’ve gotten ourselves into in an effort to make things more convenient, but I won’t. What I will say is that I want out. Completely out. I’m going back to the days of postal mail delivered bills and hand writing checks to pay those. Hell, I might even learn to write cursive again!

It seems stupid for me to maintain a printed database of accounts, web sites, usernames, and passwords just so my wife can pay our bills and access our funds in the event of my passing or if I should become incapacitated. But that’s what I would have to do. We’ve made things way too difficult in the quest for convenience that isn’t and I’m going to go back to the days when life made a little more sense.