© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 121
It’s fashionable to blame things on Americans. They arrived late for two world wars, and have overcompensated by arriving early ever since. Their intelligence (military, that is) has the look of bad comedy. And their cultural contributions to the brotherhood of nations seems to consist of the movie ‘Scarface’, bad sitcoms, though not the military kind, and the bubblegum that I am so desperately trying to convince my daughter to forgo.
I have normally been kind to Americans, but have decided that I want a go as well now. Here’s something to think about…
Most of the world uses the A-paper standard. The reason for this choice is that the A paper sizes scale up and down proportionately. For instance, if you want to reduce an A3 to an A4, you use a certain percentage on the Photostat machine. If you want to scale down from an A4 to an A5, you can use exactly the same percentage.
It’s a useful system that saves time on design and in the office, assuming you can find the right buttons on the Photostat machine and don’t get sidetracked into making Photostats of your hands or face.
There are two countries on earth that don’t universally use the A-paper standard: the USA and Canada. In these two countries, they use the letter format, and various other obscure formats, none of which make as much sense as the A-paper standard.
Yet for some reason, although there are only two countries that don’t use normal, sensible paper standards, the rest of the A4-using world seems to be lumbered with trying to cope with the letter format.
Every time I use a printer, I have to reset it to on the A4 format. Every time I set up a document, it’s the same story.
If I have spent an optimistic five minutes of every week for the last 18 years, resetting printers and documents to the A-paper size, that works out to 78 hours of my life. There is a lot that you can do with 78 hours. Now consider the fact that I probably have substantially more than 20 years of work left in me. How about you? How many hours do you expect to spend altering document and printer settings in your life?
Now consider the problem on a global scale. Imagine 50 million or more workers each making the same adjustment with the very liberal allowance of 5 minutes every week. It translates into a massive number of productive man hours lost.
I doubt it is a conspiracy. It’s probably more a matter of bumbling myopia on the part of manufacturers who believe that the North American continent is the center of everything, and the standard to which the rest of the world aspires, even if it does involve illogical and unobtainable paper standards.
Yet this myopia surrounding the North America continent is not limited to paper sizes. It extends to every sphere of life from moral attitudes to consumerism.
Let’s take a real look at what Americans are doing. They aren’t engaging in an apple pie existence. Actually they are gorging themselves on junk food.
This column could easily go into more attacks on the people and culture of the North American continent, but it won’t. Instead I am now attack everyone else from myself to the anti-consumerist malcontents who stand our side of the world.
The reason the American Dream has prevailed is because we have given it credence with our belief. We allowed ourselves to believe that the Dream was worth having, but lost our tempers when we didn’t get enough or things didn’t go the way we expected. So some got guns and others got bitter.
Neither of these are solutions.
Instead we should be looking at what we have, and what we can make of ourselves in the absence of the American Dream. And perhaps we should be insisting on comforts that are natural to ourselves.
One good place to make a beginning seems to be software and printers. By giving hardware and software manufacturers a hard time on the issue of the printer defaults. If enough people complain, something is sure to filter back. And perhaps we will all be five minutes richer every week.
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