Paper Chased

You have probably heard of the movie, “Paper Chase.” It’s about a college law student and the quest for that all-important piece of paper—the diploma.

Well, I am here to tell you that whoever turned that phrase, “paper chase,” only needed to add a couple of letters to come up with a phrase which is more to the point—paper chased. Ask anyone. The trick these days is not working for four years to acquire paper but to keep from being eaten alive by it ever after.

I’ll bet the character in the story, after he earned his diploma, settled down and bought a three-bedroom house in suburbia which gives him mortgage companies, banks and insurance companies to deal with. They will each give him a pack of paper an inch thick and tell him not to lose it.


Yes, I know. You were thinking that Bertha needs to learn to use online banking, Ebay, and e-mail. Well, I have. All it means is that there is now more than one way for computers to talk to me, which is another article for another day.

I remember when computers first came on the market, they were going to single-handedly save the forests and free up rooms full of storage space because we wouldn’t need to keep hard copies of all the world’s data. Well, there is as much paper as ever.

Computers have just made it easier to “make” more paper. Now everyone can make papers.

In order to try to solve the paper overload problem, inventors have done their best to help us sort and organize all of this paper. You can use any of the following tools to try to dispatch all of your paper: besides electronic filing there are paper weights, files, folders, staplers, round files, paper airplanes, trays, boxes, crates, scrapbooks, attics, day planners, fireplaces, cedar chests, recycling bins, cupboards, drawers, jockey boxes, shredders, binders, etc., but it is never enough. There are always papers left over.

There really is a paper tiger and if he isn’t growling at my heels, he is at least always right behind me breathing down my neck. What to do with all of the papers is the nail-biter. What will happen if I don’t keep this receipt? What if the IRS wants to see my medical expense records? Will I need to keep the fortune from my cookie? Where should I put it? What if someone comes to repossess my groceries? Am I covered? Well, the desk is, and so is the counter, and the nightstand, and…

The newspaper—not this one of course, but the daily—gives me a daily headache. I feel guilty if I subscribe to it and then don’t read it—which would be a big waste of paper, so I save it, hoping that I will get a chance to read it the next day. By then I have two to read. Try doing that for a week. I did finally unsubscribe and cut that much stress out of my life, but it is never enough.

On the days that I did read the paper though, I read, more than once about how many pounds of sugar Americans consume in a year. It’s up 26 pounds in the last 20 years to a whopping 135 lbs. per person per year. I am sorry to say that I probably eat and carry my per-capita share of that sugar.

Well, it can’t be more than the per-capita consumption of paper. Maybe someone has already figured it out. I might be able to find it here in one of these piles…oh yes, I printed it on paper from the internet.
“The per capita consumption of paper in the US is currently over 748 lbs.”

It’s a good thing I don’t have to carry all that around my waist.