Paperless Office? Yeah right
When I was doing Computer Studies at school (remember the BBC Micro anyone?) one of my teacher’s pet concepts was the “paperless office”, that great day in the future when all information would be held on computers and people would no longer communicate by letter but by something called “electronic mail” (sounds ridiculous doesn’t it?), removing the need for paper in our lives.
Ok, removing paper was probably a bit optimistic, but twelve years later, with laptops, mobile phones, PDAs and the like (not to mention the Internet) having made such a radical difference to the science of information exchange, are we any closer to our paper-free Utopia? Don’t make me laugh.
I have the distinct feeling that in fact, there is actually more paper rustling around in our lives than there was back then. Certainly, the huge mound of pizza takeaway menus, invitations to Alpha courses and catalogues for window frames I remove from my front doorstep every morning seems to grow back ever more aggressively. There are less obvious signs though. Even in the normal course of correspondence (bills and the like), the amount of paper I acquire seems worryingly large given the purpose it actually serves. I recently tidied my bedroom (yes, it was that time of year again!) and the pile of paper I threw out for recycling was far in excess of the pile I actually kept.
An example: BT required 3 sides of A4 to tell me that I owed them 30 quid. In addition to that, there were a couple of brochures which didn’t seem to be saying anything at all, and one of my personal pet hates, the pre-addressed envelope. Now pre-addressed envelopes are fine if they’re also pre-paid, but in the case of BT they aren’t, and there are a myriad of other options for paying your bill: at the post office, at a BT store, at a bank, by phone, or the Net (my bank’s website or BT’s own). In this age (that’s the age of the paperless office, remember?) I suspect not many people are going to bother writing out a cheque, filling in the form that has to go with the cheque, writing your 87-digit account number on the back, putting it in the pre-paid envelope, finding a stamp, and schlepping down to the post box in the rain to deliver it. So why waste the paper? Anyone with that much patience can probably find their own envelope, and might even be possessed of sufficient penmanship to write the address on the back themselves!
In a move towards our paperless society, BT now lets you view your bills online. Except it’s not that much of a move, because it still sends you the bloody things in the post as well.
All these computers may well make the paperless office a real possibility, but the problem with computers in this respect is that they tend to have printers attached to them. The temptation to print out that important email “just so you know you’ve got it” is great. I know, I’ve done it myself, usually with things like Ryanair’s “ticketless airline” confirmation emails which last for 24 pages with full details of conditions of carriage, refund policy and what to do if your luggage ends up in Goa instead of Amsterdam.
So I’m now embarking on an experiment. My next Open University module (server-side planning and scripting) starts next week, and the previous one produced enough paper to fill half a bookshelf - and that’s not counting the set book, which this module doesn’t have. So I’m going to try and see if it’s really possible to be totally paperless in this respect for the next 12 weeks. I suspect I’ll just get tired of jumping between browser windows, and it’s so easy just to knock out a copy, isn’t it - and oh bugger, where’s my bedroom floor gone?
