Like the poor...
Jan. 19th, 2008 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperance...some things are with us always.
Being in vaguely reorganisatory mode, I have been wandering around my office feeling overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of paper (thirty years of a writerly career, all of it documented, none of it sorted. Pity me...). And remembering, obviously, with mild degrees of snark, all those promises of the paperless office, and the way my use of paper has quadrupled since good honest typing was replaced by data-entry and the simplicity of printing yet another draft. (I understand that at least one of the bright young boys - Scalzi? Doctorow? - doesn't actually own a printer, but that's too bleeding-edge for me: I still like my words on paper. Despite the accumulated overwhelmingness of it all.)
But anyway: although this will clearly never be a paperless office, the one thing that is yet more certain is that it will never, ever be a paperclipless office. I've just been signing some contracts and posting them to my agent; as they came as PDFs and had to be printed off, they had to be paperclipped, which meant I had to grovel around behind the desk for the box of clips, where the boys had knocked it. And I hefted its familiar weight, and remembered suddenly why it is quite so familiar. I bought this box of a thousand paperclips back when I lived on a farm outside Carlisle, when I lived off writing stories for magazines and was probably posting half a dozen a week, using many paperclips. Even then, though, almost as many came in as went out, one way or another; and these days I rarely use a paperclip at all. The farm outside Carlisle was twenty-five years ago, and the box is still half full. I do not expect to see its bottom in my lifetime. I think I should bequeath it to someone, as an heirloom of my house.
Being in vaguely reorganisatory mode, I have been wandering around my office feeling overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of paper (thirty years of a writerly career, all of it documented, none of it sorted. Pity me...). And remembering, obviously, with mild degrees of snark, all those promises of the paperless office, and the way my use of paper has quadrupled since good honest typing was replaced by data-entry and the simplicity of printing yet another draft. (I understand that at least one of the bright young boys - Scalzi? Doctorow? - doesn't actually own a printer, but that's too bleeding-edge for me: I still like my words on paper. Despite the accumulated overwhelmingness of it all.)
But anyway: although this will clearly never be a paperless office, the one thing that is yet more certain is that it will never, ever be a paperclipless office. I've just been signing some contracts and posting them to my agent; as they came as PDFs and had to be printed off, they had to be paperclipped, which meant I had to grovel around behind the desk for the box of clips, where the boys had knocked it. And I hefted its familiar weight, and remembered suddenly why it is quite so familiar. I bought this box of a thousand paperclips back when I lived on a farm outside Carlisle, when I lived off writing stories for magazines and was probably posting half a dozen a week, using many paperclips. Even then, though, almost as many came in as went out, one way or another; and these days I rarely use a paperclip at all. The farm outside Carlisle was twenty-five years ago, and the box is still half full. I do not expect to see its bottom in my lifetime. I think I should bequeath it to someone, as an heirloom of my house.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 10:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 10:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 10:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 02:36 pm (UTC)Of course we've all got more computing power in our mobile phones than there was in a mainframe when I saw my first terminal in an office (I believe that mainframe has been passed on to my current employers, but that's another story)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 04:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 11:12 am (UTC)In contrast, I scan roughly 2000 pages per year. Every time I work over a CEM or galley, I scan the sucker before I mail it back. This is equivalent to photocopying it without wasting the trees; if it gets lost in the post, then I hit the "print" button for another copy. (NB: this has saved my ass at least once in the past two years, when the Royal Mail lost a CEM.)
One day I shall buy myself a nice (and expensive) Fujitsu document scanner and get rid of all the paper. If you're willing to pay 300 quid and up, here's a type of scanner that can scan double-sided documents at 30 pages per minute, blast the output into PDF format, OCR and index the text so it's searchable, and dump it into a folder on a Mac or PC (no Linux drivers, dammit).
(There is not, as yet, an option to pipe the output slot straight to the shredder, but you can see where it might complete the idea.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 12:01 pm (UTC)Except, yes, the scanner thing. Every time I post a CEM, I worry. Never lost one yet, but as you say, that is not to be banked upon.
Fujitsu, hmm? I can very easily make £300 sound not-so-much; I only need remember my first printer. Daisy-wheel, no sheet feeder, print a book by standing over it all night feeding in paper by hand, one sheet at a time, listening to the 'ammer-'ammer-'ammer and watching the print-ribbon judder to its end - and that cost me the best part of £900.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 02:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 02:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-19 04:40 pm (UTC)El