Like dust, paper sifts into my house and settles on the countertops and furniture. If I don’t get to it, before long it stacks up in great dunes of paperwork, forms to be filled out, bills to be paid, statements to be entered in Quicken or Excel, junk to be filed away. Whether its ultimate destination is a return envelope, a file folder, or the trash can, every single piece of it has to handled, examined, thought about, and acted upon.
I’ve known for a while that I would have to get to the stacks on the dining-room table and on my desk. It couldn’t be put off another day, nevermind the stack of student papers and the remaining work to do in the index of medieval & Renaissance history, forget the housework that hasn’t been done in three or four weeks, the empty gas tank, the long shopping list hanging on the fridge. Somewhere deep in the pile was a Visa bill and a car insurance bill, both of which needed to be paid. Soon. Maybe yesterday, for all I knew.
So, having overslept Saturday morning, along about 8:30 I dove into the dreaded task. And…
It took a good four hours to dig out from under all that crap!!! Filling out the forms and copying all the receipts and supporting information for the Avesis claim was probably the most infuriating. Why is it necessary to ask the customer for policy numbers, group numbers, and individual numbers that do not appear on the insurance card, were never sent in the mail, and have to be retrieved by calling the company? What is the point of demanding repetition of facts that are already in the company’s records?
And how, pray tell, do my gender and birthdate bear on my purchase of one, count it, one pair of cheap glasses? What is the point of wasting paper, ink, postage, and my time on this redundant and irrelevant trivia? By the time I finished, I’d filled out a two-page form and photocopied nine more pieces of paper to stuff into the envelope with it. Postage consumed two of the USPS’s pricey little stamps.
Then there’s the form required to ask for the $10,000 of tax-free funds residing in a Northwestern Mutual whole life policy. Is there a reason a form has to be incomprehensible? What, for example, do you suppose is meant by “cash value of,” “face value of,” and “to cost basis”? These terms have exactly zero meaning to me, and I can’t even imagine where to go to look them up and try to figure out how they apply to my particular request, which is a simple “please give me back my money.” No one’s home at Northwestern Mutual, of course: on a Saturday, only the customers have to work.
The Hartford sent not only the current policy and two copies of the piece of paper the State of Arizona requires one to purchase each year and carry around in one’s car, but also three more envelopes full of paper. Lots of dense copy there, too, much of it mind-numbing. The vast amount this company charges to insure my aged car, OF course, requires me to get online and transfer funds from the money market to a checking account, another time-consuming bit of ditz that has to be entered in Quicken, after the credit union’s receipt is printed out and filed. More paper, more ink: more of mine.
By the time I was finished, along about half-past noon, the house was still filthy and the larder still bare. Half the day was absorbed by dealing with paperwork, much of it pointless and way too much of it invasive demands for information that is strictly none of anyone’s business.
A nation of sheep is what we are. If, as a people, we were not passive and indolent, we would rise up in full rebellion at corporate demands for private information that go way beyond anything needed to get a given job done, at the deluge of unnecessary and wasteful paperwork, and (most infuriatingly!), at the newest trend that requires consumers to download and print out online forms, thereby wasting their own ink and paper for no very good reason.
Allons, enfants de la patrie!
To the barricades!