Paperwork

I went through a lot of paperwork this morning.

Fortunately none of this time involved filling out any paperwork. Instead, I spent two hours this morning organising and clearing out all the various types of documents my wife and I have accumulated over the last five years or so.

We’ve killed a lot of trees living a fairly normal life. Medical billing receipts. Utility bills. Old tax returns. Reams and reams of paper generated by just two people. It made me think: how many file cabinets like ours (a small one at that) must exist across the country? Across the world?

And that’s must personal stuff. Millions of companies and government entities (especially government entities) must generate exponentially more just in the course of doing business.

Anyway, I was glad to have cut down our filing cabinet load by at least a third. Now off to a professional shredding service these unneeded documents will go.

Presuming these shreds will be recycled in some way, I wonder if my cable bill from July 2015 will become part of someone else’s hospital bill months or years from now. Sort of an odd fate for some tree, that. An unintentional immortality.