You can divide the human race by how they hang pictures.
The anally retentive proceed from order to order and the reverse from chaos to order. The former are conservative, secretive and reliable, if boring. The latter are experimental, declamatory and, from a safe distance, enchantingly undependable.
Hanging a picture, or even a human being, the retentive first assemble sticky-tape, a carpenter's pencil, measuring table, paint and brushes, hammer and special nails. They proceed in peace and quiet. They measure all, then make tiny marks on the wall; they attach sticky tape and eventually hammer; step back, squint and inspect.
They attach picture wire in the same way. Once their sense of order and colour coding is satisfied, they hang the picture and never look at it again.
They may say modestly: "Pictures can make a room look cosy, can't they?" or "Hanging's too good for rapists."
The reverses simply cock an eye, hammer and, with flair, hang. They leave shards of plaster on the floor. If they don't like the result, they hammer in another nail. If they were dealing with criminals, the howls would be deafening. They trust their eyes; and believe that human beings should accommodate themselves to the image.
Putting the two types together is as much a recipe for a discord as two eldest children marrying.
Common to both is the fantasy of the paperless office which would represent order to the retentive and the preservation of trees to the reverses.
But the paperless office is really only a fantasy, not because the technology is lacking: it is simply deficient and laborious and the governing wet-ware, the human brain, is archaic.
Achieving a paperless home office would need a scanner, a large computer disc and an owner with the time and ambition of a zombie. I find the idea of no paper alluring, not because of the trees, but because papers can never be found when you need them. Regularly a bout of tidiness seizes me; I resolve to scan all the paper cluttering my environment. Then I will find things easily.
Such bouts depend on the fallacy that the map is the territory - that if you understand the map, you've all but arrived where you want to be. Computers lend themselves to acts of symbolic behaviour.
They make you believe that if you tidy your desk and papers, you'll emerge with a new direction in life, personality, bloated bank balance and the Nobel prize.
Trouble with the paperless office is in not having enough time. What took a lifetime to accumulate will take a lifetime to scan. This excludes the time remembering where the scanner was shoved during the last effusion of tidiness, how it works and where its software is hidden itself.
Once you scan, you have to find the scanned document on the computer. If the original was old and faded, you then have to venture into the bizarre landscape of mistranslation. For example, the faded word "word" gets translated as "wz0le", that well-known Croatian onomatopoeic synonym for being hit by an avalanche of mid-winter snow. The next step in the quest to the paperless office would be deciding where to store the single scanned document. It's easier to delete it and throw the scanner back into the top of the cupboard.
Fantasies are at best ideals. The ideal is not to scan but to write less and speak more. The pollution of the spoken word is nothing compared with that of most words on paper.
Not these, of course, nor this paper. Always others'.