The last rare paper treasures
“By the way, I stole from your university. “I took four sheets of printer paper from the printer in your office,” I say to Aleks.
I need the paper to take notes for a job where it would be useful to have two devices. Because when I poured tea I looked at my monitor instead of at the tea and therefore poured the tea onto the desk instead of into the cup, from where it traveled against gravity into the inside of my laptop and destroyed the mainboard At the moment it’s only by luck that I have a single device at all, the good old Chromebook.
So far I have used the back of an Ebay invoice for my notes about permanently elastic shoe glue. I used the shoe glue to glue Aleks’ repaired cell phone back together. I also glued my shoes with it (two pairs), and I like that there are substances that can be used to repair things as diverse as shoes and cell phones. But now the back of this bill is full of writing, and I know from other occasions that this budget does not contain any easy-to-find notepaper.
“This isn’t my printer paper, it’s Roger’s,” says Aleks. “I haven’t printed anything for a long time, I don’t even know if the printer still works. Back when I was still printing, before the pandemic, I would secretly grab a bit of paper from Roger’s printer every now and then. I don’t know whether Roger himself still prints. And where he got his paper from doesn’t matter either.”
(Kathrin Passig)