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.