Coffee heat rising

Spin Those Wheels!

Well, really, I can’t complain SO much about wheel-spinning. Even though I managed to evade working on the Big Annoyance of the Day — shoveling a foot-deep stack of accursed paperwork off the desk — a bunch of stuff actually has gotten done. Ditz, it’s true…but stuff that needed to get done.

Do you ever feel like, even after you’ve managed to power through a lot of tasks, that you still have been spinning your wheels half the day?

Done:

πŸ™‚ Clean out pool pump pot; clean out pool strainer basket; reinstall pool cleaner, run pump
πŸ™‚ Figure out why irrigation system stopped working (FAIL!)
πŸ™‚ Water citrus trees manually
πŸ™‚ Water other plants manually
πŸ™‚ Spray Dawn detergent solution on plants infested with skeletonizing bugs
πŸ™‚ Repair back gate latch
πŸ™‚ Repair kitchen cabinet pull
πŸ™‚ Pick up mess in house
πŸ™‚ Change bed; wash sheets & towels
πŸ™‚ Cook and concoct dog food
πŸ™‚ Clean up ensuing mess in kitchen
πŸ™‚ Pick up dog mounds
πŸ™‚Β  Drag trash out to alley
πŸ™‚ Post today’s chapter of If You’d Asked Me… (how to handle harassment of cute young teenager)
πŸ™‚ Post link to that on Facebook
πŸ™‚ Enter comments in FB writer’s community

Not Done:

πŸ™ Write the next installment of the Drugging of America series
πŸ™ Iron jeans
πŸ™ Write more of Ella’s Story
πŸ™ Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper

AND…as you might guess, “Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper” is the chore that all this wheel-spinning has been designed to avoid. I hate, hate, hate dorking with paperwork.

So I put it off. The bills come in. The checks to deposit come in. The statements come in. This nag, that nag, and the other nag comes in from various vendors and doctors’ offices and creditors. They all get tossed on a table.

They’ve been sitting here for upwards of a month now. The table is beginning to groan under the pile’s weight.

Yes. I’ve paid the bills. But all the rest of it is just sitting there.

It is going to take several hours to plow through all that brain-banging shit. And no. I just do. not. want. to. do. it.

Should write the next Drugging of America piece. And could. That also will be a time-consuming and energy-sucking task. If I start on that now, not enough time will be left in the day to fart with the pile of paper distractions. To say nothing of enough ambition.

One thing I probably could do is have the credit union send statements electronically. That would create three fewer pieces of trash to be plucked out of the mailbox. I’m already downloading all the transactions into Excel as it is.

But you just know, don’t you, that whatever form they use to send these proposed electronic statements will not readily convert to Excel. So that will just inflict three more pieces of useless electronic junkmail to deal with. Like I don’t have enough of that?

So little worthwhile stuff comes in the mail anymore, I hardly ever bother to open the thing. Now that the mailbox has to be fortified and locked, the extra effort entailed in tracking down the key, traipsing it out to the curb, wrestling with the mailbox lid, relocking it, traipsing the key back to the house, and hiding it again makes picking up the mail counterproductive. There simply isn’t enough real mail in there to make it worth being bothered to walk out there and wrestle it out of the box.

Consequently, these days I pick up snail-mail about once a week.

Yesterday, it occurred to me to count: EIGHT out of nine pieces of delivered mail went directly into the trash.

That suggests that about 90 percent of mail being delivered by the U.S. Post Office is junk advertising circulars.

And, therefore,Β  for every piece of nuisance paperwork that arrives here, nine pieces of trash have to be toted to a recycling bin. Ninety percent of delivered mail represents pointlessly destroyed trees, pointlessly polluting paper mills, pointlessly polluting ink manufacture, pointlessly expended gasoline to tote trees, paper, ink, and junk mail around, pointlessly expended power to run those mills and drive the printing presses and operate the equipment to recycle trash that is never even opened or looked at.

That pisses me off. It ought to piss you off, too.

Oh, well. /rant.

I’d better get up and go deal with the pieces of paper that actually do require attention. Of a sort.

 

2 thoughts on “Spin Those Wheels!”

  1. I find that I only check the mailbox a couple times a week or so unless I’m waiting for something.

    A few years ago, I went around and told every financial institution and utility to STOP sending me paper bills or statements, so I get very little actual mail. My 401k statement is apparently not able to be made electronic for some reason (join the 21st century, Chuck Schwab!) Any statements I *was* getting in dead tree format, were just papers I had to shred – so I just avoid receiving them.

    A friend shared that the USPS offers a new free service called “informed delivery” – you sign up (for free) – and they will take a digital photo of each piece of mail that will arrive in your mailbox, and email you first thing in the morning to tell you what mail will be delivered today.

    It’s nice because I can check my email in the morning to see if anything I care about will arrive in the mailbox that day – and in the case of one “misdelivered” piece of mail – I got the email saying “it will arrive today” – and 3 days later STILL not in my mailbox – but I found the envelope tucked in my front door – apparently delivered to another neighbour (who clearly didn’t check THEIR mailbox daily either).

    They send out a different set of emails for packages that will arrive – separately from the photos of your mail.

  2. That just sounds like something ELSE to have to keep track of. What really would help would be if the PO would allow you to have them not deliver any mail that is not first-class or a publication (there’s a special rate for magazines, so it would be easy for them to filter those out. That way, the PO could dump all the advertising debris in the recycling, instead of dragging it to your house for you to throw out.

    Did call the credit union this afternoon and learned that Nooooo, their electronic statement is not something you can download to Excel. PDF only, thankyouverymuch.

    Since I CAN download the data from my online accounts into CSV files, I could just ask them to quit sending the paper statements. But I simply don’t trust the computer or Cox to stay online reliably…somebody hacks it, Cox goes down, some wackshit snafu happens, and then I lose access to my own data??? No, thank you. I think, though, that it may not be necessary to open the envelopes from the CU. Maybe just throw them into a box and keep them for a year so a hard copy CAN be checked if some question comes up; then shred them all after 10 or 12 months.

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