Cool Check Backgrounds

Continuing my check theme (see Fake Check Issuers, Beware!), I will share something I find highly amusing.

The other day, one of my managers was sorting through a stack of pay day loan checks. These are checks which customers write out and date for up to two weeks in advance. We hold these checks until their due dates, while charging exorbitant amounts of interest, at which point the customers must either pay off the check with cash or, if they don't pay off the checks by the due date, we will deposit and run them like normal checks.

Anyway, each day's new loan checks need to be looked over to assure their accuracy (if we deposit the checks and they bounce, we rely upon a collection agency to collect the money for us. This agency, however, is very finicky and requires that everything--date, amount, even the signature--are just so. There are many rules which I will not bore you with, but rest assured that they are extensive. If anything is unsatisfactory, the company will not collect the money and we are out of the money the customer owes.) and my manager brought up how ridiculous some of the backgrounds of checks can be.

We started to joke back and forth about burly men having checks with kitten backgrounds and the annoyance their significant others may have about that. And then my brain switched gears.

I revealed how I've always been dissatisfied with all of the check backgrounds I've seen because kittens and cartoon characters and floral patterns just don't do it for me. And that's when it hit me--I should make my own line of checks. But instead of depicting lame things like puppies or desserts, mine would be so more more . . . unique . . . morbid . . . shocking . . . offensive . . . in other words, all around cool.

I toyed with the idea of marketing several series of checks with these themed backgrounds:

1) Road Kill -- artistic close-ups of mangled animal carcasses left on the side of the road.
2) Festering Gun Wounds -- high resolution of all the infected and oozing glory
3) Ugly Babies -- hair lips, lumpy heads, and sickeningly disproportionate facial features
4) Cannibalistic Orphans -- imagine a combination of Lord of the Flies and Annie
5) Confused Old People in Dangerous Situations -- an old man with a walker in a cornfield unaware of the combine coming right at him, a wrinkled woman trying to open a pill bottle while inside of a lion cage as the hungry beast approaches, an old couple bickering over the remote while aliens invade through the picture window behind them

Could you imagine a cashier being handed this check? Can you see the horror corrode their fake smile? It would be glorious. And it'd be all my doing.

But it could be so much more than checks. It could be t-shirts, calendars, coffee mugs, and rubber stamps! It could be playing cards and greeting cards and wall posters! It could reach millions across the planet! It could make me rich! Rich, I say! Rich!

Or not. Because, you know, I have no idea what I'm doing. I also lack that thing, what do they call it? Oh, yeah, motivation. But if you know anyone who has a friend of a friend whose brother's ex-girlfriend has a cousin who would know how to help me get this started, have that obscurely connected individual get a hold of me.