Words for My Enjoyment

It’s Time To Stop Complaining About Your Paper Cuts Like They’re War Wounds

June 18th, 2006

War is hell.

But tiny little slices in the outer lining of your skin, caused by envelope edges and report covers and little stacks of yellow and red post-it notes are not. And when you hold up your hands and makes me squint to see the paper thin cut you have on the corner of your “most important and over-used digit ever” and flash me that “oh god I think a mortar just about blew off my finger” look…

I just start wishing that you’d stop complaining about your paper cuts like they’re war wounds.

Look. Don’t get me wrong. I know you work a long day and you shuffle a lot of paper. I know that sometimes over the course of doing all that shuffling and collating and filing and stapling and clipping and folding and pushing and rolling and slapping and saving and getting and waiting… Well, that accidents can happen.

But it’s a paper cut.

Now if suddenly the 3M corporation (known for their awesome Post-Its) came out with a weaponized version of their Post-Its… For example, instead of being made of paper, they’d be little stacks of tightly wrapped shrapnel — and every time you pulled a Post-It off the top layer, shrapnel would shoot out in all directions and slam into your co-workers bodies, and the shrapnel would stick into them and cause them pain and discomfort… And then you started complaining about the cuts in your hands…

Well, I’d be cool with that.

Or if tomorrow you and I went down to the Office Depot and we realized that paper manufacturers, in an attempt to make paper pushing a more exclusively-skilled job talent, added razor blade edges to all of their paper so that no one would just “toss paper” at you any more… And if you happened to be the person that paper had accidentally been tossed at, and in an attempt to catch said razor-blade edged paper you lost a tip of your finger or your entire left pointer finger…

All good.

But you and your insignificantly-cutted fingers, your miniscule-marred digit tops… You and your raw envelope-licking tongue and your bruised base of your stapler-smashing palm… You and your swollen fax-dialing fingers and your paper-clip indentationed palm? These are not ailments or health issues that can be or will be covered under your HMO’s current health plan. These are not injuries that will allow you to get disability funding. Musical artists like U2 and Natalie Cole are not going to throw a huge international live aid concert to raise money for your insignificant cause.

No matter how much you complain.

Now if you could turn these minor ailments and annoyances into bigger issues, then maybe you’d have something here. If you could turn a paper cut that only a microscope could see into a bleeding, dripping, finger-covered-in-red, kind of screaming moment of insanity where you flee throughout the sea of cubicles spraying redness everywhere… If you could allow that bruise on your palm to grow, fester, grow some more, then eventually split open to reveal a huge pile of maggots…? If you could use the edge of an envelope to fully cut your entire tongue off (or split it in two at the end like that guy who spent millions trying to turn himself into a snake)…

Then you’d have something.

Then I’d take your whining and your crying and your “Show-and-Tell Finger-Wound Theater” more seriously. Then I’d actually look up from that game of Tetris long enough to pay you some attention. Maybe then I would consider your vocal stylings a little more legitimate than insignificant.

But until then?

Until that happens?

Until the end of that sharpened paper clip is so deeply lodged in your retina that every time you try to look up at me for help a steady stream of bloody retinal juices sprays out instead, disallowing you to see anything but blurry liquidy real-life goodness…

Until then?

Well, you’re just going to have to stop complaining.

Posted under Complaining, Office Supplies. |