Hey, Q....why go out at all? ;-) Think how much safer you are at home where rain can't fall on you, dogs can't bite you, the sun won't hit you with ultraviolet rays, and the wind won't blow in your face. Besides, there are all kinds of weird people out there in the big, bad world and some of them might talk to you face to face! Yuck! Maybe they would have bad breath or get some germs on you. Then there are dangerous animals and insects too.

Yes, I think you are very wise to be avoiding all that unpleasantness and saving $2 in gas by staying home. Thank God we live in a world where we can now almost totally avoid anything we can't totally control...

And think of the time and energy you save by just sitting in your chair and pushing buttons, instead of walking out the door!

You're onto a good thing, man. (grin)

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Gnu, I think Rose probably just likes doing things the way she always has done them, because she feels safer and better that way. Old people (most of them) tend to become very set in their ways and they resist change tenaciously. My mother's 82 and she's absolutely determined to change NOTHING in all the many small, largely unconscious habits she has developed over the years...no matter what. She has 4 women friends who drive her nuts every day by phoning several times a day and interrupting her when she's trying to cook a meal or something...but when I suggest that she could add an automated answering service to her phone and take their messages when she's busy, then call them back AFTER she has finished cooking, she not only absolutely refuses to even consider it...she gets all angry and upset at me for even having caused her to momentarily have to think about the very possibility of doing something she hasn't already done before. She refuses utterly to change anything, because she is frightened of change and she doesn't want to deal with it. She'd rather be stressed out a few thousand more times by her crazy friends interrupting her with their incessant phone calls than face a brief period of high stress dealing with the horror of learning something NEW, which is what would be required for her to learn the answering machine routine...which I would set up for her. All she'd have to do is let the phone ring 3 times when she's busy, and check the messages later. She apparently rather die than face that.

She would also have to face the horror of deliberately not answering a ringing phone when it might be an emergency. In the past 60 years there has never been a phone call to my mother which constituted an emergency. Never. Yet there still MIGHT be! So there is no possibility she could face not answering a ringing phone, even if she has to struggle through flaming barbed wire to get to it.

All this says nothing about real convenience or real anything agt all...but it says a great deal about how desperately certain old people will cling to the acquired habits of a lifetime rather than deal with doing anything new that they're not yet accustomed to.

I don't know if that's why your mother resists the bank card idea, but there's certainly a chance that it could be one reason why.

Having a bank card, after all, is not really a big deal one way or another. It doesn't matter. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to. You can just put it in the dresser drawer at home, and forget about it. No one will notice. No one will care.

It's kind of ironical, really. Rose can't give up her habit of living without having a bank card, neither can you, and the bank employees can't give up their habit of continually pestering both you and her to get one! It sounds like a whole bunch of people all engaging in unconscious habitual behaviour to me. How annoying it must be for all of you...

Rose could carry a sign in with her saying, "NO! I don't want a bank card. Don't even try to make me get one." That would tip them off right away that they have a dangerous old subversive at the wicket. ;-) As for you, you could do the same, but you're not as old as Rose, I assume, so there's really no excuse for your refusal to submit to their unconscious habitual agenda. They should have called in the Swat team immediately and MADE you get that damn bank card or be terminated with extreme prejudice. Your kind are a threat to the very foundations of the system, after all...