Dropping Paper

There is altogether far too much paper in the world, or at least in my life. Of this I am quite sure. You join me as the total and utter two-tone sound of a scanning scanner and shredding shredder signals that more paper is being erased from the world. My tidy-up continues, albeit at a slower rate, because today and for the past few days I have been making big in-roads into getting rid of all those unwanted bits of papers - receipts, bills, letters, credit card statements from years ago. Most people throw them away but I can't. I need a strategy to deal with them, and that strategy is digital.

After all, there's nothing that doesn't get better if it's computerised. Paper takes up space. It is hard to find, and harder still to search. Get all that information in a computer, on the other hand, and you can store entire roomfuls of paper on something the size of your fingernail, and search the whole lot in seconds. The whole thing strikes me as terribly efficient and excellent, and so, quite aside from the huge tidying-up benefits it brings, I have decided that I want as little paper in my life as is possible.

So I am busy scanning. Scanning and shredding. Already I have several years of American Express statements on my computer, instead of clogging up my vital passageways. In addition, a quick visit to their website reveals that in future, they would be more than happy to send me new statements on the computer, which will save them the bother of printing them out, and save me the bother of scanning them in. I like this a lot. Soon I will be clutter-free and organised, with every single piece of information that I could ever need just waiting at my fingertips.

Someone asked me the other day why it was that I was even bothering to scan stuff which was of so little use. My truthful answer was "so that I can throw it away", but I think in a way it goes deeper than that. With my increasingly poor memory, it's very much the case that I will soon forget anything that I don't still have. I wonder if that might go some way to explaining my hoarding tendencies.

I feel a little like Mr Benn. Remember at the end of each adventure, he would somehow mysteriously have picked up some kind of pebble or artefact from the earlier events. "I'll keep it with me", he would say, "to help me remember."Yes, Mr Benn's house was probably full of junk and pebbles too.

Anyway, back to reality, and inspired by my tidying prowess, I also phoned my bank. Lovely as bank statements are, they are a major source of clutter and I can NOT throw them away. As far as I know, I still have every bank statement I have ever been sent. All 19 years worth. I am looking at them right now. And so, given that I am so very clearly mental, I need a better way to deal with those monthly chronicles of my financial transactions.

Turns out the bank is happy to help. They can't stop sending me statements entirely (apparently that would be illegal) but they'd be happy to just send me one big bank statement, once every year. To say I was pleased was an understatement, this is perfect and will do very nicely indeed. Before I had finished celebrating, though, the nice lady on the phone told me that 'her colleague' had flagged my bank account for a 'review' and would I mind hanging on while I spoke to him?

No wonder - my bank used to phone me almost every month to have one of these 'review' sessions, which is basically them going through their "big list of things we sell", and seeing if they can sell me anything. After a while I told them to stop doing it, and that instruction means that, legally, they can't contact me to sell me things. It does, however, mean that if I contact them, they are perfectly at liberty to try to sell me as much as they want - and since I don't think I've phoned my bank any time in the last three or four years, they were clearly pretty keen to get the chance to try on the old sales routine again. They had nothing I wanted, but I let them try. They're only doing their job, after all, and it's not like I was paying for the phone call.

So, all in all, I am feeling busy and efficient. Doubly so since today is another eBay cheap listings day, providing another chance for me to share my junk with the rest of the world. Who will buy my sweet red roses? I wonder. Of course this is a double-edged sword, because any eBay seller can never have too many packaging supplies, and in my case that means I tend to hoard used jiffy bags. After all, such things are indespensable. But even there, I am making grand strides, and last night I went through my three boxes of stored used jiffy bags, and discarded the ones which were the least likely to be re-usable, either because someone had written my address on them with inconsiderately large writing (so it'd be hard to re-use by sticking another label over it), or for some other reason which would probably be too boring to articulate here.

But I still feel like I'm doing something. And maybe, just maybe, now I might actually be getting somewhere too.