By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Most of you have by now received, or will soon receive your own equivalent to the Billion Dollar Big Bank Bailout, in the form of an unasked for check or automatic deposit in the amount of a whopping $250, if you happen to be a taxpayer (CEOs and Senators thus presumably exempted).

Here’s what happened to my $250 bonus. I hadn’t even gotten it yet when (in fact, perhaps, because I hadn’t even gotten it yet) my bank WaMu/Chase reached out and grabbed $34 off the top. That was for an overdraft, because my auto-billpay automatically deducts my monthly bill payments prior to sending out the check in the snail mail. Which means they get to spend my money interest free for a week or so. This has cost me on a regular basis, because the bill payment checks go out, more often than not, before my automatic deposits and other checks come in. And this week my primary income deposits were all from five to ten days late (blame the economy, I guess, or maybe Tim Geithner). Amazing how that works.

Anyway, after WaMu grabbed their share, I was still feeling good about having $216 extra spending money left. Except that I had to give $200 of it to Sprint, and my promised refund for switching cell phone companies is still missing in action, because Sprint has still refused to give me a receipt to send to the new company, Credo, for my refund. Which means my bonus is now down to, um, $16. Or was, until I went to the dentist yesterday. So much for my bonus.

Meanwhile, my wife has fared little better. She got $250 too, along with a bill from her college for an extra $160 in tuition increases. Her college (name withheld for security reasons) still insists that she is a non-resident. Apparently, the fact that she has lived here in Washington State for two years is irrelevant. Even the fact that our daughter is in school here fulltime, my wife has been a fulltime student at said college the whole time, and our one and only home is located here are all irrelevant. She may be a spy, from California, they say. Or (gasp) China. Guilty until proven innocent. Meanwhile, there goes her $160 and we can write to our congressman. At least he thinks we live here.

All of this sudden new expenditure, absolutely coincidental to our brief flash of fortune, of course, is to make up our rightful share of the $13 billion in AIG executive bonuses, or maybe the $90 million Cheney-Halliburton bonuses for electrocuting those terrorists in Iraq. (Oops. Sorry, actually, it seems, they electrocuted 16 of our soldiers, instead. But hey, everybody makes mistakes, and Cheney’s friends need support too.)

Sorry. I got off track there. Somehow I thought Barack was going to change all that. But at least he sent us some pocket money. It all balances out in the end, I guess. At least that’s what Geithner tells us.

So meanwhile, my wife is busy planning what to do with her remaining $90. Maybe she could lend it to me, for a down payment to pay that nice car company that offered to sell my unsold PT Cruiser (remember that?) in return for only $198 up front. Granted, I didn’t stay on the phone after hearing that part long enough to get the rest of the details. I already told you about the Art Scammer. But apparently there are a lot of other creative people prowling the internet searching NWautos and Craigslist for more suckers like me, in this case willing to pay $200 up front so that they can post their own ad on Craigslist and NWautos. Of course, they insist they “have buyers waiting.” Just for my car, it seems. I guess those buyers can’t read. Or don’t read Craigslist or NWautos, anyway. Otherwise they’d have found me a long time ago, without any $200 middleman whatsoever. Like that art scammer did.

Ah well. Maybe we can use our combined remaining $106 to take a holiday spin somewhere. At least it would pay for the gas. Some of it, anyway. Speaking of Halliburton.

Happy day after Memorial Day.

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.