Never see the inside of a bank again?

SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- Bank branch offices are obsolete. Still, many of us are forced by the medieval mindset of financial institutions to drive across town week after week and stand in line so we transmit binary data to banks via dead tree pulp (i.e. paychecks). Fear not -- help is on the way.

Extreme telecommuting -- the work-from-anywhere lifestyle -- has a hidden "gotcha." "Freelancing," or working as an independent contractor, enables the extreme telecommuting lifestyle. When you work for yourself, and can do your work by phone and Internet, you can live anywhere and still make a living. The catch is that, if you're getting checks from various and temporary employers, you can't easily set up direct deposit. Employers need to send a check somewhere. If you're in Madagascar, actually receiving mail quickly and depositing a paycheck is, well, unlikely.

The Internet has made it possible to work from anywhere. But banks make it impossible -- or, at least, difficult -- to get paid from anywhere.

Every time I get a check, I drive to the bank to deposit it. I stand in line because everyone else is doing it, too.

And what do the banks do with your check? They scan it -- they make the data on it, and a picture of the check itself, electronic as quickly as they can. (That doesn't stop them from "placing a hold" on checks for 10 days or more, presumably so the teller can walk to New York and ask if my employer really sent it....)

Businesses are afforded the convenience of scanning checks themselves, then transmitting the data to the bank -- thus saving them in the costly indignity of doing what you and I have to endure -- drive, stand in line, then hand over paper.

Fortunately, two companies are planning to fix the problem.

CheckFree Corp. (a subsidiary of Fiserv Inc.) announced a service this week called Remote Deposit Capture that enables everyday working stiffs to scan checks at home, then transmit them to the bank electronically for deposit. All you need is a regular PC and ordinary scanner.

(The service is available now... to banks and credit unions. It's up to them to offer the service.)

The second company to provide help with paychecks is Earth Class Mail, which is a company that receives all your paper snail-mail and makes it available to you online. The company says they'll roll out a new electronic check deposit service before summer.

I've already signed up for Earth Class Mail, and I'll report back on how the whole service works, including the check deposit service, once I've got it up and running.

Neither of these services is available for actual use yet, but I'd like to send both companies a preemptive "thank you!" for long-overdue relief from the wasteful requirement of driving paychecks to the bank -- and for adding one more welcome link in the chain of technologies that free us to live and work from anywhere.

Now all we need is a "virtual ATM service" that lets us print money.