Today I have been doing an exceptionally physical part of my job (well physical for me) today is my monthly trip down to the “paper room” as I call it. It’s a room where all the loose “miscellaneous letters, documents, files, memos etc get dumped once they have been sufficiently dealt with/ignored. (Trying very hard not to think of what “dealt with” might mean)
My job it to go through the entire room... yes the ENTIRE ROOM full of paperwork and sort the papers into separate piles.
There’s a pile for highly classified but needs to be kept for possible legal defence or probably blackmail purposes.
There’s a pile for moderately classified and so copies will probably be requested repeatedly by various branches and bureaucrats
There’s a pile for anything that has a monetary amount on it that will need to be handed into the accounts department at the end of the financial year.
There’s a pile of pointless irrelevant information (I like to call that pile the vanilla pile) which is what we submit to the various MP’s and governmental oversights.
And there’s the discard piles that *could* be spilt into hyper classified, dangerous, incriminating, upsetting, borderline pornographic and extremely amusing. I stress they could e split into these piles but since they are all marked discard, I like to keep them all in the same pile which I like to call “The Floor”
Note to self: Do not, I repeat DO NOT get caught up in reading things that catch your eye. Not only does this cause me to sit for hours on the floor getting no work done and result in me having to come back down here tomorrow to finish the job, but it also causes me to have horrifying and detailed nightmares about some of the things I have read. (I’ll never look at Hobnobs the same way again... shudder.)
Once I’ve sorted all the “keep” piles I stuff all the documents marked discard into large blue refuse bags and carry them downstairs (yes to my favourite place the archives.) I take a long walk with a rather large trolley piled up with bags higher than me, thankfully just paper so no danger of being crushed (although there was the time I tried to do all the bags in one trip and took 25 minutes trying to dig my way out of an avalanche of burst bags and paper.)
