Back in December, the bank that I did not choose but was nonetheless my bank decided to introduce some checking account fees. If I met certain conditions, my checking account would not be penalized. Indeed I met those requirements and had no reason to believe that I wouldn't be able to meet them in the near future, but I was upset over the principle of the matter. I also don't like having to remember extra rules. I like to assume that my checking account is free; I don't want to have to remember that I need to keep a minimum balance of $1000 or have direct deposit on at least a monthly basis. I've got thousands of rules to remember as it is; I don't need more related to banking. Besides, I would rather that $1000 be in my savings account earning money (however little) instead of sitting unused in checking.

So the search was on for a new bank. First I found a local, privately-held bank. It had good credit ratings and did not foolishly invest its money like the corporate megabanks that caused the recession. I figured that a smaller bank would have fewer rules and be more customer-friendly. The reality was, the smaller bank had more rules, more fees, shorter hours, longer wait times for cashing checks, and managed to screw up my checking account in three different ways within a 6-week period. It's everything I didn't want in a bank. I have no idea how these banks stay in business. If everyone did their research, crappy banks would have no customers. On the other hand, maybe that's why these banks are small.

Whenever you tell people you're looking for a new bank, someone is bound to tell you, "Go to a local credit union!" Well I tried that next, except my experience with the small local bank told me what to look for before I went to the trouble of transferring money and ordering checks. Local credit unions (I looked at three of them) had the same shitty interest rates, the same unbearable fees and rules and wait times, and the same unacceptable hours and ATM options.

I was about to give up when an accountant I was dating suggested ING Direct for my savings account because it had a good interest rate. Well, good being a relative term among banks where you're depositing less than $50,000. When I originally signed up with Washington Mutual, the savings account had no minimum balance and paid 3% APY. Try to find that anywhere in the universe these days. WaMu was bought out by Chase, who promptly sent the interest rate into the 0.9% range. All the more reason to switch.

Anyway, I looked into ING Direct. It's an entirely online bank, which to me at the time was a revolutionary concept. It was designed to be your second bank. You were supposed to have a local brick-and-mortar bank with a checking account that you would link to ING to transfer money in and out. The reason for this was, ING doesn't allow you to write your own checks. Not having physical bank locations and eliminating the bulk of check fraud was how ING was able to offer decent interest rates and lower fees.

Upon further research, it turns out that Charles Schwab and Ally Bank offer similar services with fewer fees and higher interest rates than ING Direct. However, ING has some interesting features. While you can't hand-write checks, you can have checks printed and mailed for free. So for those few bills that you can't pay online these days (homeowners association dues, club dues, whatever), you can pay them in person in cash or have a check sent. You can even set up a schedule to send out checks regularly, if you want, and save the payee addresses so that you don't have to type them in each time.

I had been writing fewer and fewer checks as time went on. I pay some bills with a credit card (which is paid off each month -- the credit card is easier than direct debit, and I don't trust utility companies to take money directly from my bank), and for anything else that I would have written a check for (termite inspection, furniture repair, personal loan payments), I pay in cash and get a written receipt. It's an interesting mix of new and old. For years I wrote checks for everything, from paying credit cards to car loans and rent payments. Now with an online bank I can schedule the payments ahead of time with a few clicks, and enjoy a higher interest rate and lower fees.

So what happens when you need to cash a check that someone has written to you? You sign it, write your account number on it, and mail it in. I think you can theoretically deposit it in an ATM as well, but that would almost certainly take longer than just mailing the checks yourself. I've done this a few times without any problem at all. Within 5 business days, the money is in my account. Ironically that is the same amount of time it took for the credit unions and local banks to cash my checks, even when I walked into the branch and personally deposited them. If I'm going to wait a week, why not suffer less of a hassle in fees and rules?

I've been with an online bank now for several months, and I haven't had any problems. I was uneasy about it at first because I wasn't sure if the checks I was having sent for my car loan would go through properly, but everything's working just fine. I should have done this a long time ago.

Not two days after I found out about Rodger Smith's accidental death, I learned of Joe Schickler's fourth of July death. Joe had been skydiving, and his parachute failed to open. Now that's one way of saying it.

Another way of saying it is that Joe's life had been rough the past few years. He lost his house, his longtime girlfriend, and his health had begun to deteriorate to the point that he had difficulty working as a contract remodeler. He went out on a couple of dates with a new woman, who apparently was just going out with Joe to get back at her ex-boyfriend or fiancee or whatever -- she opted out of the budding relationship, and that didn't sit well with Joe. He ended up stalking her by tapping her phone line and recording her phone calls. Then, bizarrely, he gave her a tape of the recorded calls, and she contacted the police. Joe got in a lot of trouble over that.

The last time I talked to Joe was at a party at my mother's house a couple of years ago. He'd been sitting by himself on the edge of the party, and I went over to talk to him. A few weeks earlier, Joe drove me to my road test for my motorcycle license. In New York, you must be accompanied by a properly licensed motorcycle driver in order to take the road test to get your own license. I ended up passing the test, and took Joe out to lunch to thank him for taking the time to do that for me. The conversation we had over pizza and Pepsi was interesting. We talked a little about women, a little about riding motorcycles, and a little about life in general. Joe was an entertaining person to talk to.

Anyway, the party. Joe was sitting there on a bench swing by himself, and I walked over to talk to him. He told me he'd just lost his house, which was a marvel of carpentry and interior design. Joe was a skilled remodeler, but had some rather unorthodox methods. When adding a new room onto his house, he cut a new doorway with a chainsaw. I remember helping him clean up when he remodeled our bathroom when I was 12 or so. I remarked to him that there was enough sawdust on the floor (I was sweeping it up) to make a whole new board. "Well they do that," he told me. "They call it particle board -- it's glue and wood chips and sawdust. So if you sweep up enough of it, we can make a new board." Despite the silliness, he did great work as a remodeler.

I asked Joe how it was going. He told me he'd lost his house. "It was either the house, or the bike," he said. I asked him what kind of bike he had, and he told me it was a Harley Davidson. I'm not a Harley fan. "Joe, you could have sold the bike, kept the house, and got another bike later on -- something cheaper." Joe looked at me like I was from outer space. "The bike's more important," he told me. We talked about bikes for a while, and he told me that his first bike was a Triumph. I reminded him that Triumphs were much cheaper than Harleys -- I thought it was a huge tragedy that he'd lost his house. You can always get another bike, but a house is something you put your life into. He'd found another place to live, but the woman he was living with was an alcoholic, and behaved strangely according to Joe. Of course, Joe saying that anybody was behaving strangely was enough irony to fill a week's worth of intelligent conversation.

Joe lived at my mother's house for a short while, before he was arrested for stalking that woman he went out on two dates with. He didn't pay all of the rent that he'd agreed to, and left suddenly without any promise of payment. Joe was always an eccentric fellow, but near the end of his life, I think he started to become desperate. He had a lot of friends and he definitely used them to his advantage. I think the weeks leading up to Joe's death probably saw many of those friendships collapse.

Joe also had trouble working -- physical ailments prevented him from being able to climb ladders and perform other electrical work that he'd made his living doing for many years.

The day before he died, Joe Schickler visited his barber. "I've got a big event coming up, so give me a good haircut -- not too short!" was his request. When he left, he gave the barber an unusually large tip.

On the day he died, Joe was nervous about his jump. I'd seen Joe do skydives since I was very little. It impressed the absolute hell out of me that this wacky guy could jump out of a plane and parachute to the ground. My father even flew the plane that Joe jumped out of a couple of times -- he said Joe was crazy in the way he approached his jumps, but that he always landed safely.

Joe was supposed to do some kind of aerial manuver with his jumping partner, but instead of following through with it, Joe pushed the guy away and spiraled down to his death.

There is no doubt in my mind that Joe Schickler killed himself. He knew what he was doing; he'd made more than 800 jumps in his lifetime. It's not beyond Joe to make it look like an accident, though. All that he had left was his motorcycle, and he couldn't chew the leather as a contractor anymore. He had little left to live for, and a deteriorating body to boot. No, Joe knew that was his last jump, and he made sure that there was no way he was coming out of it. I say this because I have seen some news articles recently that heavily suggest that Joe's death was an accident. In New York, accidents that result in death carry with them the imminent threat of state law and regulation -- in this case, something like a "Joe's Law" that institutes a kind of state oversight for jumpers and pilots, many new full-time overpaid inspectors or officials who act like assholes to everyone and answer to no one, new rules that make the sport suck, and hefty fines for people who don't follow them -- that hassles everyone and makes criminals out of honest people. This is the way state governments operate, and New York State is the king of such unnecessary regulation. I don't want to see the annual fourth of July jump cancelled because Joe Schickler wanted to end his life, and I'm sure Joe didn't want that either. He just wanted it to be over. I've been there; I can understand that feeling.

Update

According to a Rochester Democrat & Chronicle staff report from late July, Joe's parachute was examined by the FAA and found to be fully functional. So yeah... the signs were all there. Poor Joe.

I found out earlier this week that my friend Rodger Smith died last month. He was hiking near Canandaigua Lake with his wife when he slipped and fell onto an embankment, and slid off of the edge of a 75-foot gorge. Rodger made it to the hospital with severe head trauma, but did not survive the surgeries to save his life.

Rodger was kind of a geeky guy. He had a mop-style haircut that was brown but greying. His clothes were never stylish, but always clean and correctly sized. He wore thick, coke-bottle glasses. His interests were chemistry and geology. He and my friend Bruce often went on geological adventures together, hiking to strange remote locations looking for buried treasure or rare minerals.

Everyone liked Rodger; he was a great guy, even if he was kind of dorky. He was a little clumsy though -- Rodger Smith was not good on his feet. He kind of lumbered more than walked, and seemed too big for his body.

This isn't the sort of guy that you imagine dying. He was too smart, too interesting, and too gentle, and there are too many men in this world that should have died instead of him.