can't we all just go paperless?
i know, i know. i think i’ve dedicated at least three blog posts to purging and sorting and organizing. but i realized today that whenever i come to some big crossroads in my life, i feel the need to cleanse. hence the unhealthy relationship with my shredder and fascination with storage bins as of late.
and before i go any further, the shredding is complete, save for the inevitable daily junk mail. so this should just about round out the topic. for a little while at least.
and for today’s “to shred” pile:
- a dispute with first usa over some airline tickets purchased in march of 2003, in which air jamaica underestimated the value of the dollar. by 200%. so not cool.
- the appraisal paperwork from carmax for my mitsubishi eclipse. in october of 2002. so yay to me being carless for 5 years!
- a staggering $32,000 price tag on my student loan estimate after full payment. um, yeah, in 2016. lucky for me i can suture that bleeding gash long before then.
so after all these shredding sessions, what have i learned? that more people and institutions and agencies need to embrace the digital age. i hate paper. i hate killing trees. and honestly, i hate shredding. i hate slips of paper in my desk, on my desk, on the bookshelf, in my mailbox, on the kitchen counter. why must utility bills have all those damn inserts? and why can’t i turn the utility paper statements off like i can for my bank and credit cards? and even though i opted out of junk mail, how does the red cross, american cancer society, and the humane society get away with still sending me stuff?
and let’s talk about the amount of paperwork for insurance. any kind of insurance, you name it. life, renters, homeowners, health, liability, blah friggin’ blah. they all have booklets and documents with fine print and an exaggerated amount of footnotes, thus equating to innumerable pieces of paper. in my grand electronic utopia, i want to have an agent come to me with a tablet and a stylus. have me sign the documentation on-screen and with a touch of a pulldown menu, email me a PDF of the document for my records. or shouldn’t there be a universal way to send a digital signature — doesn’t the IRS do something similar to this for online filing?
and if i want a hardcopy, i’ll print it for myself from my electronic version, which has surely been backed up on my hard drive and burned to DVD. voila! my paperless ideal! i’d gladly take a 100kb+ PDF file over a 1/4” thick perfect-bound manuscript of legal fluff.
i know we can’t be paperless for everything, but i’d like to think with the strides being taken for a greener planet, that some technologies will have to be implemented to eradicate the pointless waste of paper in our everyday lives.