…so…boring…

One of the things I wanted to work on while between contracts was taming the paper monster that has begun to grow into this crazy, nine-headed beast with venom-tipped fangs and an unfathomable appetite for storage space.

For the past few years, I’ve tried (and largely failed) to go as paperless as I possibly could – I have most bills set up that way, and try to stay on top of scanning and electronically filing everything I can’t get sent to me electronically.

…but it gets away from me pretty easily, frankly…even with the relatively new printer that has the groovy document feeder, which speeds the whole thing up considerably and allows me a fair amount of multi-tasking ability while things are scanning (as they are right now – tax stuff from 1999, oooo, the EXCITEMENT, can you feel it?!).

…sigh…

This.
Takes.
FOREVER.
Plus.
Fifteen.
YEARS.

Plus also, it is boring. BOR-RING. It’s just babysitting a machine, really, splitting up very large piles of documentation and stuff into smaller piles so that it fits on the feeder, making sure each pile is all the same-sized paper and general paper weight so it doesn’t jam…clearing the inevitable jams that will happen anyway…hand-placing the ones that are weird sizes that won’t make it through the feeder…reviewing the {yawn!} scans to make sure they aren’t, you know, upside-down or hopelessly crooked or blank…and that all the mind-numbingly dull pages are actually there…and then confirming that the scanned document actually saved…blah blah blah {yawn yawn yawn} ugh…

I don’t dare do anything that would be more interesting while I do this, like try to play a video game or watch a show and knit while doing this – I know what happens next.

…hang on, I’ve hit the fiddly part with the weird-sized forms that I have to do one at a time by hand, be right back…

Ugh. I hate those. SO irritating. Anyway, where was I…oh yeah. I know what happens if I try to do something more interesting while I’m doing this, and it goes like this: One (1) stack of no more than 25 sheets of paper will get scanned per day.

I will notice that the scanning has stopped “at some point,” but will be caught up in the ‘one more row’ syndrome (here expanded to also include ‘one more level’, or ‘just until the end of this show’)…but rather than actually stopping at the end of $Whatever, I will move straight into the next Whatever, then wander off to make food for everybody or something, and then, when getting ready for bed and preparing to shut down the computer, will find myself confronted with the “add more pages or save to file” message and will then suffer some kind of mental collapse because I have only scanned 0.025% of the stack at that point.

And half of it is one-at-a-time hand-placed fiddly stuff.

And it is now 1:45 in the morning.

{sobs}

And as I’m sitting here…with approximately thirty-seven thousand more neatly organized stacks of crap that fall into that category of “probably will never-ever need to look at again, but, Lord Help You if you need it and can’t produce it”…I find that I’m suddenly remembering why I’ve never quite managed to get around to actually finishing this task before.

It’s because it’s really, really, really boring.

OK! Just wanted to share that!

Happy Easter to those who celebrate – may the returning warmth and light of spring bring hope and joy to one and all!




p.s. Seriously, how the heck many places did I work in 1999…there have to be over a dozen W2 slips in all this…!!!