How Not to File

You know filing? That thing we mostly hate that involves having to put bits of unknown and difficult to understand paper into some form of paper-shaped receptacle. Cardboard is often involved. And sometimes paperclips. And always a great deal of mess, piles of paper on the floor and that gesture where one grabs one’s hair and attempts to pull oneself into another dimension by unsuspecting follicles whilst scrunching one’s features like a strange and expensive dog.

Filers deserve respect. It isn’t an easy job. A lot of thinking and reading and categorising is involved. The categorising is the worst part. This is because sometimes things just refuse out of sheer bloody-mindedness to fall into just one category. Take, for example, peanut butter and jam sandwiches. You have a peanut butter and jam sandwich. You have three files – peanut butter, jam, and bread. But what you really want to do is file it under butter. The only thing left to do is eat the sandwich thus obviating the need for any filing at all. It works with food, but after eating one’s fifteenth piece of paper, despite the variety of flavours, such as bank statement, receipt from the unicycle repair shop, gas company final demand (which is quite nice because it’s red) and (my personal favourite) yet another letter from the endowment company telling you that you have fuck all chance of ever paying off your mortgage even if you are stupid enough to pay them more money after they have already spent all your money by investing it in peanut butter companies with shit filing systems, you start to feel quite sick.

Anyway, filing. This is what happened:

I needed to find a piece of paper. And important piece of paper. Which told me just how much money we still owe to mortgage company. Mostly because if we could somehow magic away the mortgage then the Beloved could go live in a swanky flat with bells and whistles and peace and quiet (aside from the whistles) and no Lawyers and Physicists and lunatic blog writers. The thing about magicing things away, I always find, is that you have to know what it is you have to magic away. Thus my search.

The particular paper-shaped receptacle I was searching through was one of those concertina-style filing thingys you buy especially for filing those piles of paper that accumulate with the relentlessness of an oncoming migraine in piles on the kitchen dresser. It (the filing thingy) has handy categories already printed in it. Things like ‘bills’, ‘receipts’ and (oh good, I thought when I saw this one) ‘mortgage’. I looked in the slot entitled ‘mortgage’ in the naive hope of finding my important piece of paper. No. I looked in some more slots. No. Eventually I realised. The papers had not so much been filed as dealt. Playing card-style. After having been shuffled with the expertise of a croupier on crack.

Still, much to my delight I found a peanut butter and jam sandwich handily filed under ‘butter’.

Tomorrow I am looking forward to the Alliance and Leicester helpline. Just praying that their filing system is better than ours.