The story began about 3.5 months ago, when we moved into our current house.

I went to the local Bank of America to change my address (being a computer whiz actually resulted in my mistrust of doing finance through the internet). And there I saw a sign, near the table where one writes deposit tickets, that

1. informed the patrons that due to the BoA merger with Fleet, all Fleet account numbers will now have two extra leading zeros to fit the 12 digit BoA numbering scheme.
2. suggested to the customers that rather than being error-prone and fill out the deposit tickets at the bank, they should instead use the pre-printed tickets that has the account number and everything ready for them.

I got rather jealous at that time. I was wondering why I never received those wonderful benefits. I always have trouble remembering my bank account numbers, and always need to dig through my statements before leaving home for the bank just to copy down the account number so I can fill them in at the bank. I would love this concept of printed deposit tickets.

Furthermore, I vaguely remember my sisters using such things.

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Fast-forward to today. I was writing some checks for various bills, and noticed that I am on the 33rd check in the checkbook. Well, normally checks come in books of forty, so I thought, "Oh, I am almost out." But my checkbook still felt rather full and heavy. It did not feel like only 7 sheets of paper. So I thought, "Maybe I remembered wrong. Maybe they come in books of fifty?"

And guess what I found?

Well, for starters, the check book has indeed forty checks.

The kicker is, I found out what those extra 20 or so pages are: they are the printed deposit tickets.

Suddenly, I feel very much like Ralph Wiggum.