I think good blogging requires authenticity and sometimes that means revealing things about yourself that are embarassing. Like the fact that I’ve been using Money to pay my bills for the last 10 years. That wouldn’t be embarassing in itself as Money is a fine product with myriad features. The embarassing part is that I have never used a single feature in Money other than the electronic billpay. I keep telling myself that I will, but a few weeks ago I had to admit to myself that if in 10 years I hadn’t used those features I was likely never going to use those features.

I wanted to use Wesabe but their not ready to let me pay my bills yet, so I ended up just using the web-based online billpay service from my Bank — Wells Fargo. I decided to dip my toe in the water by paying a single bill using Wells Fargo. As part of the process they asked me whether I wanted to be notified when they sent the check to my phone company. Thinking of how much dopey mail I already get I said “no thanks”. A few hours later I received the following e-mail from my new bill paying friends at Wells Fargo:

Being a pretty UI focused person I thought this text could use a scrub focused on really conveying the situation in a more genuine fashion:

To be fair to the folks at Wells Fargo, this notification telling me that I’m not getting notified happens only once per payee, and not every time I pay a bill. Still the notification about non-notification to me is the equivalent of a Costco employee checking my receipt at the exit 30 seconds after another Costco employee generated that receipt. It’s overkill.