7 ms·
That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent
by aij 7y ago
That reminds me of when my university kept sending me a $0 bill every month after I graduated. They kept sending them, so eventually I wrote a $0 check and sent it back in the business-reply envelope. I guess they were happy I had paid my bill because they finally stopped sending them.
- MichaelBurge 7y agoDid they ever deposit the check?
- vageli 7y agoWould a bank even accept it? Genuinely curious if it's even possible to register a null transaction like that.
- gowld 7y agoZero is not null!
- oasisbob 7y agoArguably it could be nullified if the payment isn't legal due to being for zero value. Under UCC §3-104, a check is only a negotiable instrument if it's an unconditional order. UCC §3-103 defines an order as "a written instruction to pay money signed by the person giving the instruction." So, to answer the original question - I don't think a zero-amount check is legally a check because it's not a written instruction to pay any money. http://www.ckfraud.org/UCC_provisions.html http://www.ckfraud.org/UCC_provisions.html
- firethief 7y agoHm. Is $0 not an amount of money?
- crankylinuxuser 7y agois "0" ~= NaN ~= [] ?
- vageli 7y agoWriting a check for $0 is not an instruction to pay. Paying $0 is equivalent to not paying.
- firethief 7y ago> Writing a check for $0 is not an instruction to pay. By describing it as a check you've already acknowledged it as an instruction to pay. > Paying $0 is equivalent to not paying. It's equivalent in terms of the final balance, but it's not the same thing in other respects. If I sent you a check for $0, you would wonder how I got your address. There are a variety of ways that it would be different from me not sending you a check for any amount of money at all.
- JasonFruit 7y agoIt is in Germany.
- denzil_correa 7y agoI once read a similar apocryphal narrative. Someone, kept receiving 0$ credit card bills and the company sent repeated reminders with warnings. The person called, sent letters to discuss the situation but to no avail. The person finally gave up and wrote a 0$ check and they stopped sending letters. However, it led to a computer systems crash as the credit card company software encountered a "Divide by Zero" error due to eh 0$ check.
- test6554 7y ago>”However, it led to a computer systems crash.” Reminds me of Bobby Tables
- thomasahle 7y agoI'm having a hard me thinking of a case where you'd want to divide by an amount of money. What am I missing?
- Semaphor 7y agoI had a similar experience. I wanted to cancel my old credit card but couldn't find a way to do it online. As there were no fees I just ignored it. Well, it turned out that my VPN still had it as the payment method and so I got a bill to please pay my negative balance (they require at least 10% to be paid off after a month). Of course, I paid. But it turns out that I need to contact them to unlock the card after I had a negative balance. I kept postponing it and kept getting 0€ bills every month. After 3 months they told me they are sorry to see me go but they'd have to cancel my account because of a balance of -0€. It was kinda funny but worked out well :D
- yitchelle 7y agoNot sure if this would actually occur but would it be a negative mark against your credit score if they had to close your account due to non-payment of a -0€?
- namdnay 7y agoCredit scores are an American construct :)
- yitchelle 7y agoThe Germans have their own version - Schufa [0]. :-( Most of other countries also have versions too. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa
- Semaphor 7y agoWhile we have Schufa, you should not (and I did not) get an entry for 0€ debt. Schufa is far simpler than the US credit score.
- superqwert 7y agoI've tried to cancel a credit card and told I needed to withdraw all money first (I had +£5). I withdrew it, and asked them to cancel it again. They started processing, but by the time they had got anywhere, I'd acquired interest (1p) and they refused to cancel the card.
- dsl 7y agoOr you might be remembering this story from an email your mom forwarded to your MSN account in the mid '90s? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zero-dollars-and-zero-sense/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zero-dollars-and-zero-sens...
- wazoox 7y agoHowever I often had bills and reminders of amounts that hover around postage price. The latest one was a 6.22 euros hospital bill.
- dTal 7y agoThere's a golden age sci-fi short for everything: http://the-eye.eu/public/Books/SciFi_Fantasy/Fantasy/Dickson%2C%20Gordon%20R/Dickson%2C%20Gordon%20R%20-%20Computers%20Don%27t%20Argue.txt http://the-eye.eu/public/Books/SciFi_Fantasy/Fantasy/Dickson... (Computers Don't Argue, Gordon Dickson, 1965)
- ankit219 7y agoAWS once sent me reminders to clear pending dues and pay the bills else service will be terminated. The bill was of $0.01.
- jvsg 7y agoyep. Me too. In my case, my bank was unable to process that amount of payment so they eventually had to strike it off my bill.
- justinator 7y agoWorked with a guy that was fed up with the phone company, so he kept like a $0.11 balance due in his account, knowing that sending him the letters asking for him to pay the bill would cost the phone company more than the total was worth.
- Ntrails 7y agoI kept a bank account open with £1 for a decade or so as a similar passive aggressive protest
- u801e 7y agoIn the US, keeping a balance that low will result in a bnak service fee that will, after a period of time, result in a negative balance (which then leads to other fees which further lower your balance).
- l0b0 7y agoSounds like misspelling "139" as "-1E9" could be profitable...
- aflag 7y agoI kept not paying my debts and just accumulating more and more. One day my debts got so large that it caused an overflow. I now have a couple billion to spare. I'll be forever in debt with whoever did my bank's decimal type implementation.