Paper

I do not like paper. In this context I declare “paper” to mean sheets of printer paper with important information on it in tiny fonts lying scattered over a flat surface or neatly buried and unmanageable in a filing cabinet/box. Not because it looks messy (although that bothers me a little) but more because I can’t see at a glance what is what, I can’t just sift through quickly and find what I’m looking for, and as a student involved in multiple groups on campus, part-time employee, and dog guide user I have tons of paper! It’s everywhere! Everywhere I go I get more of it! Brochures, invoices, schedules, flyers, reports, papers, business cards, hand-outs, syllabi, letters, resumes, applications, receipts, statements, vet records, transcripts, academic records, notices, pamphlets, booklets, manuals, lists, medical records, projects, reminders, personal medical records, evaluations, forms, sheet music, lyric sheets… You see, I do not exaggerate. I deal with hundreds of sheets of paper every week. Sometimes hundreds in a single day. This is particularly frustrating to a visually impaired person who can’t scan through things quickly.
In a perfect world I would never have to deal with paper. Everything I need would be electronic via excel, pdf, or word document files. I could find all the forms and applications and schedules I needed online. I would have electronic files for all the records I ever needed. I could fill things out, submit them, generate documents, letters, et cetera, all electronically and never have to touch another sheet of paper again. All flyers and notices would be emailed to me.
But the world is not perfect. I do have an extensive electronic file organization system, and many forms and applications are indeed accessible via the internet, but people still hand out paper. They still require things turned in hard-copy, printed, photo-copied, mailed in…so how do I cope with my difficulty? How do I manage all the paper I can’t work with easily?
Notebooks. I keep a couple of large 3-ring notebooks with section dividers, page protectors, and file tabs to organize paper in. As often as I can I scan things in or ask for emailed copies, but when I can’t get those I put them in my notebooks. I have one entire notebook devoted to Prada-related paper, and one for school-related, which takes care of the two main categories of my life these days. Now that I have a working scanner I’m going to be taking electronic copies of a lot of the paper I’ve accumulated, but I’ll keep the paper originals for signatures and stuff like that. This way I have general and more specific locations where I know certain groups of data can be found. “Vet” tab in the Prada notebook has all of Prada’s vet records, receipts, and invoices. “Syllabi” in the school notebook is…uh…gee…figure that one out. I don’t even need to be able to read the tabs, just remember how many I have to turn past, or for those entirely sightless, Braille works just fine for marking things, or differently textured pieces of tape or paper stuck on the files.
One of the other gadgets my friend Sam mentioned in his technology entry was a barcode reader. You buy these little barcodes, stick them to the tags on your clothing, or on your folders, or canned foods, or whatever you can’t read the label of, then when you want to know what something is, what paper, what color, what food, et cetera, you run the scanner over it and it interprets the information as whatever you programmed the thing to read that barcode as. I don’t have one, and probably wouldn’t need one, but this is another technique blind folks use for organizing paper.