Buy Now, Pay Immediately
Examining my phone bill, I note that while Telstra have done away with the reprehensible $2.20 fee they were charging just for the privilege of paying the damn thing, they have found another way to cut costs. The dotted line along the payment slip at the bottom is no longer perforated. ‘We’ve held your hand for long enough,’ they seem to be saying. ‘Get some frickin’ scissors.’
Only recently I decided to start paying various bills over the phone, although I do wonder if, by the time I finish punching in all the account numbers, bill codes, credit card digits and extra security manifests, I could have driven to the post office, queued up, paid the bill in person, and perused the increasing number of André Rieu DVDs mystifyingly available at the counter. And last week, admittedly while hung-over, I attempted to pay my Visa bill over the phone, using Visa.
Like, I assume, most of us, I grew up in a house where Mum would race out to collect the mail and return stomping and fuming about ‘more bloody bills’. Worst of all was the one called ‘The Rates’. That night, there would be swearing from Dad, talk of ‘cutbacks’ and sardines on toast for tea. From an early age, I was instructed to pay every bill as soon as possible and quickly developed an almost fanatical aversion to debt of any kind. To this day, I will often drive straight from the letterbox to the post office, as if the bill is a ticking doodlebug and I am Anthony Andrews in Danger UXB. ‘You’re mad,’ people have said to me, time and time again. ‘Nonsense,’ I reply, as the car mounts the kerb and I leap from the still-moving vehicle, roll headfirst across the footpath and into Australia Post, barely missing a small mountain of Footy Show Best-Ofs.
As a result of this seeming phobia, I refused to buy a car until I could afford to pay for it outright, I was nearly thirty before I had my first credit card, and have borrowed money on only one occasion, which led to several sleepless years during which I must have seen every single episode of Benny Hinn. I would shudder involuntarily whenever I heard the phrase ‘Buy now, pay later’, and respond to suggestions that I ‘put it on hire-purchase’ with visible disgust, like Pauline Hanson making a wrong turn into Chinatown.
But, now that I think about it, years have passed since I last heard the phrase ‘hire-purchase’. Does the concept still exist or has the practice of dishing out credit cards like complimentary nuts consigned it to history? I myself haven’t put anything on ‘HP’ since the early nineteen eighties, when my friend Pieter Malkmus somehow convinced me to spend over a thousand dollars on a synthesiser, despite my inability to recognise, let alone play, a single note of music.
At that time, my annual wage was $9000, so the idea of spending $1,299.99 on anything was purest fantasy. But these fancy new ‘electronic keyboards’ were popping up in video clips all over, and Pieter, himself dressed and coiffed like a paid-up member of Heaven 17, had spotted one in the window of a furniture shop. As he was then on the dole, it was decided, by Pieter, that I would invest in this ‘dead set chick magnet’, a flat, sleek Technics model, balanced cheekily on the arm of a fat brown armchair.
‘But I can’t play,’ I protested.
‘This’ll make you learn,’ Pieter insisted. ‘And how hard can it be? That guy in the Cars video is playing it with one finger.’
Twenty minutes and a $120 deposit later, we were lugging it onto the bus. Pieter sat leafing through the instruction book, while I calculated how many $9.50 weekly payments it would take before I actually owned the damn thing.
‘Look at this,’ said Pieter. ‘It can actually play entire tunes for you. Whaddid I tell ya?’
‘So, it’s a 1200 dollar music box?’
‘And there’s a built-in drum machine. You’ll be a one-man Tubeway Army.’
‘Isn’t Gary Numan already a one-man Tubeway Army?’
‘No, I think there’s one other guy. Or maybe a computer.’
We could fill entire bus journeys with such discussions during this period, one when the NME was calling the Human League’s Dare the best album ever made. Suddenly, thin, pale, effete-looking nerds were topping the charts with songs that sounded like they were composed on a Casiotone. Even the two-chorded sound of the punk era was beyond us, but ‘Da Da Da’? Surely we could knock up something like that in my bedroom, with the Technics doing most of the work.
In fact, it sounded like shit. It was the sort of thing Gary Numan would use only if he were playing the Silver Bell Chapel in Las Vegas. As the refreshments were being served. When I pressed the AutoPlay button, it farted out something that sounded like the soundtrack to a porno movie for insects.
‘Why did I buy this?’ I said to Pieter. ‘Why did you make me do this?’
‘You must admit it does look pretty cool,’ he replied.
‘So I should, what? Carry it with me to the pub?’
For the next three years, it sat in its box in the back of the wardrobe, while I dutifully continued with the weekly HP payments, each time watching expressionless as the old lady at the shop stapled another crinkled receipt into the little cardboard book. When I finally paid it off, I felt nothing. Pieter was long gone, working not as a member of Blancmange, but as a mortuary assistant with an unusual haircut.
Years later, I ended up giving the Technics away, to another friend who played keyboards in a theatre-restaurant comedy show. Ironically, the Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me?’ was one of the songs she played in the show, which, if I recall, was set in Transylvania.
Since then, I have, of course, made dozens of equally idiotic purchases. Laserdisc players, CD-ROMs, collarless shirts, a telescope, three separate supposedly definitive remasterings of The Stone Roses, to name but five.
But I’ve always paid cash.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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