things kevin hates

I’ve been on the job hunt lately and needed to pick up a few copies of my transcripts from college and grad school. One of those two schools makes it quite easy to get transcripts: fill out a form online and poof, it’s done, and is mailed to you free of charge. The other? You’re required to print out a form and mail it in, or go in person during business hours. What the fuck? It’s 2010 and you can’t get this shit online? I won’t name names since I enjoy my part-time employment there, but this university (which happens to be located on St. Charles Avenue and isn’t named Loyola) also used to require that grade forms at the end of the semester be filled out with #2 pencil and turned in by hand. They only changed over to an online system in 2009. So many things can and should be done online, yet aren’t. It baffles me.

Paperwork is messy and complicated. If you want to give someone else what you have, you have to go to a copy machine, make them a copy, then find a way to bring it to them. But need to send them a file on your computer? Thanks to the Internet, that takes a few seconds and you don’t even have to get out your chair. And you don’t have to waste any paper, either. I mean, if someone invented devices that could communicate with each other in an instant, even from one side of the world to the other, you’d want to use them, wouldn’t you?

Or consider something like taxes—the government is even worse than academia when it comes to forcing stupid paperwork on people. I’ve been using TurboTax and it works pretty well. But I think there’s some sort of filing fee if you want to do it electronically (definitely for the state return, maybe not for the federal one anymore), so you’re stuck printing the return out, signing it, and spending 44 cents on a stamp.* Now, I know the way it works in Louisiana is that the printed return is basically all written out in a standardized typeface and format to make it easier for computers to read. But surely it’s easier to have a system where electronic returns are submitted free** and a computer handles your electronic form instead of reading a printout.

One of the things I’m looking forward to as the younger generations take over things is that this stupid paperwork crap will disappear. I can’t imagine people who grow up on smartphones putting up with piles and piles of stupid forms.

* I feel vaguely bad that I had to look up the current price of a stamp. But not that bad.

** Well, obviously it wouldn’t be “free,” since it’d have to come out of someone’s tax dollars. But it wouldn’t be any surcharge.