The Weight of Paper

According to my sources.....(ok I am not going to lie... I used Wikipedia for this one) One sheet of paper weighs around 5g (seems a bit steep to me but Wikipedia couldn't be wrong could it?) but the point is one piece on its own... pretty insignificant...... but add many MANY MANY pieces together and they will crush your office if not your sanity.

It's the snowflake example: one=pretty little speck; many=roof caves in.

So it is clearly a miracle my entire office had not crashed through the earths crust and been burned to a crisp - such was the inordinate weight of paper.  Most of it unfiled or misfiled or piled on various flat surfaces.... boxes piled everywhere - I could hardly move.  I enter this photogrpah as Exhibit A.

In my defence...... there is NEVER enough storage space in a child care centre and one with the luxury of a big(ish) office becomes a store room of sorts.  At the moment it has art for the Art Auction on July 9th as well as Silent Auction items for the same event.  It also has the after effects of two conferences and several work events....and all my teaching stuff..... ok it's not much of a defence but it's all I got.

A paper angel descended a few weeks ago in the form of an Office Goddess names Kristin.  We hired her to tame the paper and it has been a BIG (weighty, one might say) job. First she surveyed the chaos (and didn't quit on the spot) and then she designed a filing system on paper that made sense to me (and hopefully anyone else who might use it) and then she actually made the system - every file, every label....... it is a thing of such beauty I get misty eyed (Ok no I don't but it does make me happy!).

Then we Kristin moved piles and piles of paper - much of it in to achive boxes that I shipped off to the storage unit today (on a side note - it was a genius who invented storage units - what we will pay for space to store stuff - and how creepy are those places? shiver).

And we Kristen shredded.....a lot.....

And now I am going to move the furniture around and it will be a whole new office.

And it is, in fact,  so light, so free of those millions of 5g bits of paper, that it might just float away this weekend. (I wish)

Ahhhhhhhhhh.