Cashing Checks?

First of all, this post is is 40% asking for advice, and 60% ranting, so take the following with a grain o' salt.

So, when did it become so difficult/expensive to get access to your own money?

Let me explain my situation. My job gives paper checks, and does not offer direct deposit option (I know, in this day and age, huh?). I've found it frustratingly difficult to actually have access to the money in a reasonable time frame. My own banks (Chase and Bank of the West) refuse to actually "cash" these checks. Checks which are made out to my name, checks that I receive on a bi-weekly basis, checks whose dollar value does not vary wildly between pay periods. They ask me to deposit the checks, instead, which will invariably lock my hard-earned dollars into a loop of holds and waits (especially since I get paid on fridays, and I can only deposit the checks either through ATM on friday evening, or saturday morning, either of which will cause the deposit to work its way through the system beginning monday morning [the next business day]).

"Tough, it's the way it is, and it has been this way for a long," you might say.
Inb4 the judgement, and the impending "manage your funds better noob"s and the "why are you so poor? keep enough funds in your account to cover the cash value of the check loserrrrr"s let me just offer a non-retort by saying people's financial situations are different and unique, and in my current standing, while I do make a fair amount of money, I also have a very tight scheduling of payments and necessary expenditures usually hit the max limit of my income. i.e. my dollars "turnover" rate is pretty high, and pretty quick.

With that said, when did it become so complicated and convulated to have access to your own money? In theory, checks are supposed to be just as "fluid" as cash. But in my experience, I realized that I really only have several options (none of which I think is fair):

Option 1: Desposit the check on friday night/saturday morning. Wait til monday for desposit to show up pending. Wait til tuesday, wednesday, maybe even longer for the funds to actually "clear" (on the flipside, how much does the average lender charge for a 5 day loan?)

Option 2: Pay 3% at a check cashing store. Have immediate access to funds

Option 3: Drive over to the random, obscure bank that my employer uses to issue the checks (about a 10mi drive), cash the check directly from issuer and have immediate access to funds. This particular issuing bank, however, actually STILL charges 5 dollars to cash checks, if you are not an account holder!

So based on these three options I have, it seems in all three scenarios I am still ultimately losing out in one way or another, via direct fees to have access to MY money (options 2 and 3) or through the indirect opportunity costs of not having access to my own money for an indeterminate length of time (option 1).

So how 'bout it? Can any of you smart and clever people give a workin' fella some advice?