paper, no paper

I have two distinct ways of woking.  I am a traditionalist in many ways.  I love fountain pens and paper and journals and notebooks and paper calendars.  I am a technophile in others.  I love new gadgets (my wife calls them toys).  I want newer and faster and easier and glossier and smaller and bigger and cheaper and more expensive.

I just started a new career last week (that explains my lack of posts the last two weeks).  I choose a field, Real Estate, that traditionally requires a ton of real paper.  Sign this, fax that, make copies in triplicate so you can file them and the attorney can file one and the mortgage company can have a set and so the copy of the copy can be stored offsite in case mutant paper eating zombie rats eat all the paper in the office.  If you have ever bought a car or a house, you know what I mean.  Why can’t we just use a thumbprint reader or some of those things  like at Lowe’s to sign without a piece of paper.  The organic co-op I used to belong to never used one piece of paper.  You signed up online and ordered online and paid on the owner’s iPhone and signed on the iPhone and they sent you an electronic receipt.  I can buy almost anything from Amazon without using anything paper related.  But the mortgage and real estate industries still thrive on paper.

My Doctor can send prescriptions electronically but some places still want a fax with a written out signature.  I think it is a conspiracy by Georgia Pacific and Kimberly Clark (they make paper) to enslave us all to paper trails.  I kinda understand, though.  I still like to see my bills.  I don’t like to have to file them or keep the folders in my desk organized, but something there is about a stack of paper.  I have a friend who used to keep stacks of paper on his desk.  He knew where everything was.  I was appalled, but then I would spend one day each year making new labels for my filing cabinets at work.  I knew where everything was on my desk as well, mine was just neater.

Now, I have a decision to make.  Do I go back to my “old” ways of filing or forward into the new frontier of “paperless”.  The paperless office was predicted some 20 or so years ago.  I soon discovered that “paperless” didn’t apply to our industry.  We wanted to be ISO 9000 and something compliant, so we put bank sheets of paper in documents with the words “sheet intentionally left blank”.  We put documents inside our documents to document the changes made to the documents no one ever read.  Someone imagined if everything was a PDF, we wouldn’t need to print so much.  So we printed two copies, one to file and one to work on.  We even had recycle drives to get of the paper, just so some attorney could call a halt to getting rid of things because of some lawsuit.

I scanned things for a while and stored them on CDs.  Then I found out that some company was using substandard CD backing that was causing the metal to flake off and the “indestructible” digital data was being  wrecked faster than the paper it replaced.  So, I started doing some research into becoming “paperless” and I became more confused than ever.  Not having paper around was supposed to make our lives easier, but now I have to keep with up all the bills I don’t get.  So I made a paper form to keep track of my non-paper bills.

My next great nerdy adventure will involve me forcing myself to start keeping things in “the cloud”.  I can’t lug around my MacBook everywhere I go,  my iPhone 5 is too small to type a long email on cause my fingers are too fat and who wants to be seen with an iPad everywhere you go?  Okay, lots of people carry their iPads wherever they go, just not me, at least not yet.  So I am going to use my Evernote and Dropbox and Google Drive and iCloud accounts to start keeping things handy.  I will still probably have a paper calendar and a journal and will find a way to buy more fountain pens, but my days of paper hoarding are coming to an end.  In theory.  If I have to.  I guess.  (Anyone get the Red Green reference?)

In all fairness, I did take my iPad with me to the warehouse club on Sunday and it was a life-saver.  I was able to schedule a house showing and email back and forth with a client while my wife drove on I-95, well she was busily occupied with trying to not get run over by the other drivers.  When did 90 become the accepted speed in Florida?

The geek in me looks forward to the change, the tech support nerd wants the challenge and the traditionalist wants to hoard my paper and pencils and make copies of everything to put in an off-site disaster recovery storage center.  When the zombie apocalypse comes, who will care if I have a copy of my 1983 income tax statements?

See y’all soon, unless a rogue comet explodes off the coast of Ecuador and emits a giant Electro-Magnetic Pulse and fries all our electronics.  Maybe I should’ve put a Faraday cage in the ceiling while they had the roof off.