A fresh ream of all-purpose computer paper
Mar 30th, 2008 by satisfyte
Walking into a store like Staples or Office Depot, opportunity for satisfaction abounds. Office supplies, for the most part, are pretty wicked satisfying. I’m sure there will be some entries dedicated to other supplies to come (the Pilot G-2 anyone??), but for this entry, I’m going to talk about paper. If you’ve been to an office supply store, you’ve probably noticed there are all different kinds of paper available - different brightness, thickness or weight, shine level, etc. As an artist, I find paper in general to be a satisfying thing. Opening up a new sketchpad or tearing off a fresh sheet of drawing paper is a satisfying event for another day, though. Computer paper is awesome because it’s smooth, bright, and relatively inexpensive. Generally, you can buy a whole ream of it (500 sheets) for about $5, sometimes less if you catch a good sale. You might even score a jackpot like I did a few weeks ago at Staples where I got 600 sheets for the price of 500. Yeah, baby.
If you work in an office, you probably get the chance to unwrap reams of paper on a fairly regular basis if you make your way to the printer. “Oops…it’s almost out again!” you say, feigning surprise as there are a full 200 sheets left in the printer. “I’d better refill it.” You grab a ream, tear it open and pull off a nice chunk to wedge into the nearly full printer. “That’s better.” Okay, maybe that’s just what I do sometimes. If you don’t work in an office but have a home printer, this experience is probably much more rare.
Opening a fresh ream of printer paper is a lot like opening a pack of gum. If you leave the wrapper on it as you take pieces out, the experience gets less and less satisfying because there’s all that plastic and room to wiggle around and get messed up. The key is to unwrap it entirely, and gaze at its pristine beauty, take a chunk that you need to put into your printer, and then neatly stack the rest of it in a drawer for later. This allows you to have instant access to grab a neat stack of paper without having to try to finagle the whole package, risking paper or plastic cuts on your fingers and crinkling papers as you try to coax a handful of sheets out of the packaging.
Computer paper isn’t restricted just to computers, though. You can draw on it, make cards out of it, origami, all kinds of things. Having 500 sheets of it instantly at your disposal opens up the door for more satisfying activities to come. I remember being a little kid with my baskets of markers and pencils, and feeling so excited when we got a new ream of paper that I could steal from and draw on. Being forced to draw on lined notebook paper = not satisfying.
What’s your favorite satisfying office item? Do you salivate over paper, or is there a different aisle that catches your fancy?
(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
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