Despite the fact that I now have a blog on a banking website, I was actually a latecomer to online banking myself.

Dare I confess that I used to leave computing the finances up to my husband?

He made it sound so thoroughly confusing that it gave me a mild headache every time I thought about it.

“If I make the dinner/bed/holiday/funeral arrangements will you do it?” I would plead.

Little did I know he was merely chalking up the brownie points, his brow furrowed as he sighed and groaned while pretending to grapple with modern banking when in fact he was tyre-kicking classic cars on TradeMe.

Who knew he was so clever? I always thought I was the number one fraudulent brownie-point scorer among us.

Then one day he was away somewhere and I needed to access the accounts so he was forced to admit that all you needed was a password and half a brain which handily I had at my disposal. Voila! I was in.

Mostly, as a domestic account holder, I use the online services in the way I did in the olden days of bank visits and EFTPOS transactions and the like. But what I love about it is the instant put-money-where-your-mouth-is factor.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has found a months-old un-posted cheque stuck to the bottom of her handbag along with a paper clip and someone else’s gum in the past.

Sometimes “the cheque’s in the mail” is not as much of a lie as it seems.

The writing of a cheque, the ripping it out and the popping it in an envelope never seems to be a problem but getting straight to the Post Office to mail it? For reasons that only scientists working in a basement with rats and a maze and a pile of washing can determine, this seems very unlikely to happen.

Pressing the FastCheque button to pay the dog kennel, the cleaner, the people whose house you want to rent, your share of the Book Club birthday present, though, it’s just so darn straightforward, so easy, so right there in front of you, so not going anywhere as long as you know where your computer is.

OK. The truth? I actually still quite like cheques but I can’t, for the life of me, find my cheque book.