TO-WIT: THE WEIGHT OF THE MATTER
“Oh dear, what can the matter be,” my secretary murmured as she cautiously opened the door to my private office and peered in. Throughout our almost thirty five years together, she has always had this uncanny intuition that alerts her when things are amiss, and I’m guessing that the sounds of my hurling files across the room and swearing like a trooper at the top of my lungs had tipped her off that there was a problem.
“What’s the trouble,” she ducked.
Yes, there was a problem, but she couldn’t fix it. In a way, she helped cause it. The problem was paper. Everywhere. Paper. Tons of it. On my desk. On my credenza. In my files. On my floor. In my briefcase. And when I realized that the one piece of paper I was so desperately looking for at the moment was not among the dozens and dozens I had just frantically searched through, my pique suddenly peaked. I grabbed every file and every folder, every tablet, sticky note and memo within reach, anything and everything constructed of paper, and I flung all of it, together with invective, across the room.
Not yet sated, I turned to my secretary and said “Now please bring me all those files over there.” She stared at me with eyes agape in the same sad and doomed kind of way that a baby mouse stares at the plummeting owl. In short order my entire office was a chaotic panoply of paper, myriads of the stuff fluttering to the floor in vengeful disarray.
“I’m going out to lunch,” I then announced, suddenly famished, “and you can too, as soon as you’re done with all the filing.”
Now while I’ve always been bothered when I can’t find what I’m looking for, lately its gotten much worse. It seems that as both the computer age and my own have simultaneously advanced they've combined to conspire against me with an inundation of paper that is both treacherous and insufferable. Letters, contracts, deeds, closing statements, they come by post office, FedEx, emails and fax, they lie around in triplicate, sextuplicate, octuplicate, a massive, snorting assemblage of digital detritus leering at me in triumph at the success of their obfuscation. And they never go away.
It used to be that documents required effort to produce, careful typing and time, and as a result they were produced in far limited quantity. As befits any rare commodity, they were accorded suitable reverence. Today, what with the ubiquity of word processors, faxes and copy machines, documents propagate faster than bunnies. They then lie around in endless and irritating array, pleonastic impediments to the result for which they were created. After all, how can we regard any one of them with import when there are so many?
So armed with this insight and the exhortations of my secretary, I’ve made a momentous decision. Henceforth if you want me to read any of your briefs, pleadings, contracts, correspondence, whatever, don’t put them on paper. Sheepskin will catch my eye, vellum has a chance, but if its on paper, its kaput.
Besides, having the heft that it does, sheepskin or vellum is ever so much less likely to become airborne in my office. I’d appreciate it, and as for my secretary, well, she would be eternally grateful.
©2010, S. Sponte, Esq.