A few years back I read an article about the coming of the paperless office. It was an excellent piece of its kind and, maybe because I sensed the paperless office would happen around the same time my granny played rugby for Ireland*, I cut it out and filed it away for future reference. I was trying to find it again recently, but damned if I could. The problem is I can't remember whether I filed it under P for "paper", O for "office", or M for "more guff about how computers are going to change our lives". I could have filed it under the floorboards for all I know, but wherever I filed it, it's lost forever.
The sad fact is, there's so much paper in my "office" (a loose term I use to refer to half the spare room, all of the garden shed and one end of the sofa) that it would need a major tunnelling project now to get the electronic superhighway through. My filing "system" is based roughly on the geological time-scale, which ranges documents from the pre-Cambrian era - a dense and impenetrable layer comprising fossilised bills, old P-60s, and articles about how computers will improve our lives - up to the cenozoic era, where items are much easier to find but, on the downside, are mostly chocolate wrappers.
In between, there are vast layers of bills, reminders about bills, information about how to use your mobile phone, Visa slips, letters from the building society, more information about how to use your mobile phone, product guarantees, menus from the Indian takeaway restaurant, receipts and - incredibly - even more information about that bloody mobile phone. Also, and I've just remembered this, there's a letter somewhere threatening to cut off the electricity (Memo: Pay that bill today!).
I mention the mobile phone, because for a supposed innovation in paperless communication, this single item is the cause of a quite staggering amount of written communication from the service provider. And since there's never time to read any of it (there are always other time-consuming things to do, like waiting to get through to one of the service provider's actual live phone operators), your natural reaction is to file it away for future reference. Even though you know, as an absolute certainty, there will be even less time tomorrow than there is today.
But probably the most ironic contributor to the paper-filled office is the computer manual. I've owned a computer for several years, and in that time, being a member of the male gender, I have never, ever referred to any of its accompanying manuals. (Death before consulting instructions, is the male motto.) I didn't consult the manuals even when setting up the computer, an operation carried out according to the principles of the eternal male quest for wisdom, dominated as they are by one thought: let's plug this in and see what happens.
In fact I would no more consult an installation manual than I would stop and ask directions when driving - that's how absurd manuals are. But the fear that one day the computer would crash and, moments before crashing, would tell me to consult page 741 of the instruction book immediately and then contact the computer's next-of-kin, means I've never had the courage to throw the manuals out either. The box they're in makes a good foot-rest.
I haven't even mentioned press releases. But when people were predicting the coming of the paperless office those few years ago, they reckoned without the mushroom-like growth of the public relations industry; which now spews out millions of releases a day (most of them sent twice in case your fax was malfunctioning). The vast majority of this stuff is only waffle, by Government ministers, company MDs and so on. But because the truth may be in there somewhere, like the real gold rings in Bewleys' Halloween bracks, you're reluctant to throw the releases out. Instead you file them away, for future reference.
Now I know there are probably people out there who have the information age sussed, who send and receive everything by email, pay all their bills by direct debit and get their instruction manuals on pre-installed software. And to these smarty-pants people all I have to say is this: any chance you'd drop over to my place some day and help me sort the mess out? Meanwhile, if you'll excuse me, I have to find that ESB letter. It was here somewhere.
