Do you remember the grand promises of a “paperless office,” back a few decades, when computers first came onto the scene?
We were promised that everything would be handled on computers, significantly reducing the need for papers.
Alas, what we have found instead is that computers generated more and more and more paperwork than we ever imagined possible.
Back in the days when each document was prepared on its own, individually, filled out by hand (typewriter) with copies made by carbon paper or run through a copier, everything was done more deliberately. Each paper had to matter. It had to be worth it to generate, because it took time to do it.
When computers came along, it became possible to produce more and more paperwork with just a push of a button and very little deliberation involved.
I worked in real estate for about 10 years at the turn of the century (what a weird thing to be able to say, but it was from the 1990s to the early 2000s). The explosion of paperwork is nowhere more apparent than in real estate closings. The loan packages of the earlier closings I attended were just a handful of papers. Then they became more and more. Then the 40-page loan package became the norm.
The day the loan packages included a document that states something along the lines of “This is to certify that I have signed the other papers” was the day I rolled my eyes and threw my hands up.
Photographs were the same. Decades ago, picture-taking was so rare that it was only done when two factors hit at once: a momentous occasion was happening, and someone happened to have a camera which happened to have film with some shots still left on it.
Pictures were taken sparingly, because once you used all 12 or 24 or (for the freewheelers) 36 shots on the roll, you were done.
Then you’d mail it or take it to be developed, and it was always exciting to get it back.
The pictures would mostly be big blurs, or an eclipse of a thumb, or something wildly off center. If a big blur had a head showing somewhere, even half off in a corner, that picture was worth keeping.
Today’s kids have more pictures of just one event than our generation had of our entire childhoods.
What this all does is create an explosion of clutter that we are drowning in. The so-called paperless office has stacks and stacks and stacks of papers that have to be filed or thrown away, and more coming every minute. Our devices are filled with photographs, but how many were printed out to hang on the wall or keep in a wallet? How many survive after a phone gets dropped in a toilet?
I myself generate tons and tons and tons of documents and drafts and designs on my computer, and there are so many pictures on it that I am expecting at any moment for my computer to give up. Yet it keeps going.
When I was a girl, my mother said something yours probably did too: “Clean up as you go along.” One day as I was hunting through stuff on the computer, those words came back to me.
I’ve got to file and delete and clean up documents and photos on my computer as I go along.
Sometimes I remember, or I have the time, to do it.
For the most part, I just shudder, try not to look, and make a new folder on the computer to start again.
