Paper and Pen

Thanks to modern technologies we can do everything quicker, we don’t have problems like a coffee spill wrecking my exam paper, and I can easily access all my work with a click of a button. This is the way we see the world today and, frankly, I hate it. Yes I do have some memories of non-computer lifestyle disasters but now I can honestly say I have more computer-induced panic attacks, and I am computer literate with up to date software, so where’s the problem? The problem is that we have replaced the “what-needs-to-be-done” with the complete cut-and-paste “what-looks-cute and has a cool design”. In this rant I’m focusing on school and work projects because I remember projects being basically three steps: research (in books), first draft, and final draft (with some pictures). Now it’s a fucking nightmare.

First of all, when I was younger doing research wasn’t as tedious as one may think; in fact it was quite easy and straightforward. Now it has turned into a “search-tirelessly-through-the-web” to find contradicting facts and ending up on pages by bloggers that can’t who don’t know shit from putty. I do actually have fond memories of taking out seven books from the library, opening them and finding the information that I needed, and it worked. I do also think I was more productive and got the job done faster.

Then moving on to first/rough drafts, I must admit it is easier now to go back, make some corrections and change a few things. Here lies however a problem, instead of being happy with what you ended up with you start to overcorrect and spend hours rewriting something that was pretty good in the first place. I mean it’s better than having that random “this-isn’t-working” anger and throwing the writing in the bin and starting over, but it sure as hell doesn’t lead to that inspirational moment of figuring out how to write that closing sentence.

Lastly, the step I hate the most today, the final draft. This used to be stupid-simple, all you had to do was put the project nicely together in a binder, find some snazzy pictures and you were on the way to celebrate your finishing of the project.  You didn’t have to worry so much about margins and if the file format was correct or if that interesting picture of a dog actually barked, after all it was just a picture of a fucking dog. Now if the margins of your index page aren’t 13 centimetres (or whatever it is) you might find yourself late at night putting dots in a line because the project was rejected, seriously loosing sleep for fucking dots. Even worse, you can’t just hand in that project with a couple pictures, oh no, it must include a PowerPoint with action buttons along with the written document and all beautifully packed together on a pen drive (I hope your file is avi!!!). Putting this stuff together takes fucking hours, and it has nothing to do with the actual quality of the project.

I do realise that anybody reading this will say I’m old fashioned and don’t understand the joy of searching through witty cartoons on google images to find that extra punch for presentation slide number 5, so be it. But having lived through the non-computer age and being rather computer literate, I have to say that I actually wasted less time on things when I was younger and had more free time because of it. I might actually go smash my computer right now and grab a pen and paper; at least I can be sure that my paper-written file will be there tomorrow.