Tomorrow a lot of states are going to go vote in the Republican and Democratic primaries. So today I’m going to talk about how much I loathe paper.
I really do loathe it. I’ll admit it’s a handy tool when you need to communicate information in a low-tech way. And it’s often easier to read paper than it is a monitor — you can cram more information onto it at once. It’s what Tufte calls “high-resolution.” Recipes are good on paper because computers are cumbersome. (And yes, the new Apple paper-book or whatever it’s called would also be cumbersome, if for no other reason than you don’t want to spill three tablespoons of sugar into your $3,000 laptop.) Paper is good for taking notes, but then you must immediately put those notes into a computer. Because — and this is why I loathe paper — paper gets lost.
So far today I have hunted — amongst the credit card offers and notes from the apartment complex about Senior’s night and exterminators and sales circulars and bills and political mailings — for my auto registration, a website comp, and login information for a side project I am working on. I found the registration, eventually found the login information, and it seems the comp was probably gnawed to death by a small child before being thrown away.
Sometimes paper gets eaten.
You can’t search it. If you need to keep it you have to have a file drawer. If you lose it you can’t generate another copy. If you give someone your copy you either have to duplicate yours with a machine or give up the original. If you revise it, you need to make a new copy and then you have an old version and a new version. And then you have to throw it away to get rid of it, unless it has sensitive information on it in which case you have to shred it, preferably cross-cut, and then throw it away. (The state of Virginia frowns on feeding credit-card checks to young children.) But most of all I hate the searching and the filing and constant monitoring and upkeep of paper and paper storage devices. I would be a lot happier without paper.
Except in books. Paper in books is alright by me.
4 Comments
You’d be amazed how quickly the small child grabbed the vehicle registration from the coffee table. But I rescued it.
Probably the most frustrating thing about paper is that if you have exactly the layout and format you need right there in front of you, you still can’t use it as a template.
But you don’t have to force feed the checks to your child. Just leave them sitting in grabbing distance and he will probably offer to eat them at some point.
Actually, that registration was an invalid one so he can have it.
And yes, it would be nice to have a template. And Cory will surely attack the checks if I let him get close.
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