Die paper die
So I happened to be between switching jobs and I have an offer that I am tentatively going to take up till something better from my pipeline (hopefully) confirms. Yesterday morning I had to meet with the recruiter at the consulting company through which I would be staffed to this major financial firm. Both, the consulting company and the end client company are fairly big. It goes without saying that they do thorough background checks. I have had to fill out an extensive background check form (forms?). I have had to do two(!) drug screening tests done, and one finger printing done.

All this is fine. I guess I can understand they need to do their due diligence and check me for my background and so on. What drives me nuts is this. I spent about two hours filling out between 15 - 20 forms that either the consulting company or the client company needed. What's more, they had me fax half the documents earlier. Upon confirmation of the receipt of the faxes, I naturally went ahead and shredded the faxed documents. After all who would need them now, right? Wrong. They wanted to see the original forms I had faxed to them? What? Well they had to start the process earlier, but needed the originals for their records. I agonized at first, but then soon complied by the craziness and filled out the forms again (and to match what the original faxed documents said). To the end of that I joked, so where do you keep all these paper records? Akin to a server room, do you have like a paper vault kind of a room? No, they send them to an offsite location. Oh okay.

So that was that and after a long day of taking care of what seemed like an endless list of errands I fell asleep on my couch. I wake up suddenly with a sweat running down my back. What seemed like a nightmare was just piles of papers or so I remembered a few minutes later. The earlier incident had hit me in the subconscious that led to a great woah moment and that I'll get to a minute, but first let me explain what formed the subconscious and why it was jolted.

I have two giant plastic boxes that hold all my papers. Right from currently-important papers (degrees, birth certificate, visa papers etc.) to once-important papers (old rent receipts, bought property documents, old car documents etc) to I-may-need-these-every-one-in-a-while papers (my utility bills, pay-stubs, bank statements) to remind-me-again-why-I-have-these papers (shopping receipts, really old parking tickets, useless information brochures etc.). I started them out nice and organized but over the years of constant abuse (dumping of collected mail and retrieving documents as and when needed), it has become a messy monster of a paper pile. In fact it is so disorganized I almost always have to ask my wife which box a certain document may be in. I dread the thought of having to organize it some day in the future. The irony of these boxes is that they are both green in color while what I keep in them suggests nothing close to green.

Every once in a while, when checking my online account for either my utility company or my bank, I would be prompted to go green, go paperless. And I would deny it. And it is for the same reason I have had my shredder collect dust over the years without using it for what it was created to do - well, shredding, what else?. I figure what if I need a certain document, or a certain utility bill or something else for something petty as renewing my license from the DMV. Would I have access to these documents later if I went paperless now? I choose not to. I don't have the time to understand that there may be way to retrieve / print e-documents from my utility company or my bank. Here I am with stacks of papers. Disorganized. And yet I want more of it because I am too afraid I won't have the right paper when I need it.

Papyrophobia. I just checked on google that's what they call it. Fear of paper. That is what I have. And that is exactly what was triggered further by this incident earlier today. And here's my chain of thoughts after waking up from that dream that led to the woah moment I was talking about.

Thought process 1 (solution to current problem) : why doesn't the consulting company create / utilize some sort of an e-document system where people like me could simply fill the forms and submit. The company could simply print and store in either soft / hard format.

Thought process 2 (refinement of business idea): well what if I switch jobs again and have to fill similar forms again? Why not create a employee / employer setup where people could send each other documents, they could fill them online with known personal information and e-sign, and then store for personal records.

Thought process 3 (enhancement): think of forms at the doctors office, legal / accountants offices etc. why fill out forms ever? Simply take a picture, or scan/email, or fax, get the document ocr-ed and filled in with standard info, ready for you to verify / print completed form

Thought process 4 (level up): shouldn't I have all my papers (yes the two green boxes) scanned, ocr-ed, tagged, backed up? Doesn't everybody have the same bulkloads of papers stacked up high in the corners of their houses? Shouldn't the consulting company do this too with all the papers in their 'offsite' paper vault? Shouldn't all companies do this too?

Thought process 5 (level up to woah moment): what the hell are we doing in this age of computers working with papers everywhere. Is this what the future looks like? Would people a 100 years from now still be working with papers? I think they will have a hard time understanding why we needed papers. If everything paper can be stored, distributed, searched, and backed up digitally while being so cost-efficient, space-efficient, and carbon-footprint-efficient, why print? Ever? I am not particularly green, but I have an issue with papers. I say let's end the madness and stop the crazies from cutting down anymore trees. Let there be no more copiers and shredders and scanners and fax machines wasting all our office spaces. Let there be no more mail clutter on our desks or for that matter let there be no more postal services (well, you may need them for the christmas gifts, but you get the point). Let there be no more green boxes or blue or red boxes holding any of our papers. Let's make our offices and our personal lives a lot more efficient and clutter free. Let's end the insanity we call paper. Let's start the fire. Die paper die.

tl;dr - too much paper clutter; how do I get rid of it?

Burning questions for now:

1) Am I alone (and crazy)? Or is this a common problem?

2) If you do solve this problem, how do you do it?

3) Do you see a business potential here?