I saw a good story illustrating the power of an unusual situation to create either good news or bad news. A fellow by the name of Ron Borgna in Binghamton N.Y. was frustrated by the size of increases in the water rate. So he made up his cheque for $2,509.66 on three squares of toilet paper and presented it at the water office. The office refused to accept it.
Mr. Borgna has been in dispute with the municipality since 2006, and was trying to settle the whole outstanding amount, including fees and late penalties. Clearly, the man was trying to save face. But the municipality would not let him. This is sometimes called a moral victory.
Now there is no way that you could process a cheque like that in the normal manner. It would probably be called a "special item," and would be manually handled by every bank that touched it. (With a bunch of manual handling charges to match.) But, if it had all the correct information on it, I think it would be legal.
The water authority had two options, and it chose the worst one. If they had accepted the payment, they would have demonstrated a sense of humor. By continuing to fight with the man, think of the hours of management time being wasted. Much more than the value of this unpaid bill, I would wager.
In the photo above, found here, you can see two senior people from the municipality on the left.
A better way
Instead of creating all this bad press, good press could have been created. The banks involved could have been asked to co-operate, and the city could have said, in effect, "hey, we know people hate paying bills, and we don't want to encourage this, but we have a sense of humor and we are glad to see Mr. Borgna meeting his legal obligations."
This way, they look like a bunch of heavy-handed jerks. Plus, they're not yet done with this thing!
Here are a few of the news-type references I found:
How I first heard about it: from Finextra, a financial newsletter: Man tries to pay water bill with toilet paper cheque
The American spelling, toilet paper check, generated over 500,000 entries. Associated Press covered it, so it was picked up over a wide area by networks like MSNBC and papers like the Denver Post.
Even the Canadian/British spelling toilet paper cheque yielded results: CNews, Citynews are two examples of Canadian news outlets that picked the story up.
