Too Much Paperwork Quotes

What are they fighting about?" Julian could take his guesses. "I would say Grady wants to shoot me. Garrett is telling him no, too much paperwork.

Rose," Alberta said, leaning toward me. "I'm going to be blunt with you. I'm not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren't my student anymore, I don't have the right to ask or tell you anything." "You can lecture," I told her. "I've always respected you and want to hear what you have to say." The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. "All right, here it is. You screwed up." "Wow. You weren't kidding about bluntness." "The reasons don't matter. You shouldn't have left. You shouldn't have dropped out. Your education and training are too valuable—no matter how much you think you know—and you are too talented to risk throwing away your future." I almost laughed. "To tell you the truth? I'm not sure what my future is anymore." "Which is why you need to graduate." "But I dropped out." She snorted. "Then drop back in!" "I—what? How?" "With paperwork. Just like everything else in the world.

She stands like she’s trouble, and though her jagged haircut is trying too hard to tell me that she doesn’t care what I think, the pugnacious set of her mouth tells me everything I need to know about why she got dropped out of all those schools. The hair is what tells me she needs help, all right, but her mouth tells me she doesn’t need that much and she probably just needs time to work it out for herself. And I want, want, want to tell her not to sign the paperwork and to instead go out with me and live happily ever after in a tiny apartment in Baltimore because I always liked Baltimore and we could have two poodles, both shaved strangely to attract attention because I can see that’s a big part of her, and pretty much eat take out spring rolls every night, because that’s a big part of me.

Ideally, work is consecrated. It is something that happens within the present moment . . . Ideally, work is just another beautiful form of joining the cosmic sparkle. But this is an ideal. . . . I worked as a psychiatrist in public institutions . . . for nearly 20 years. During the last 12 of those years, I was consciously trying to be mindful of love, to practice the presence of God. It was the most frustrating thing I ever tried to do. . . . as soon as I entered the ward everything changed. I was immediately kidnapped. I was gone: away from the present, away from any sense of love or its source, away from even appreciating my own being. . . Looking back, it seems clear that I went into my sense of responsibility for the diagnosis and care of the patients. . . . And there was so much paperwork! Most days I would remain forgetful until my work was done and I was driving home. Then I would remember, and such sadness would fill me. Where had I been? How could I have allowed myself to be so captured? I can remember driving home one day after I had spent a long time feeling helpless with a very disturbed patient. I actually slapped myself in the face when I realized I could have been praying for her and praying for myself instead of just worrying about what to do. I tried everything . . . and still it did not “work”. . . . It stopped only when I left the psychiatric institutions and started working full-time with Shalem. . . . I go into this detail because what I am saying does not apply only to psychiatric institutions. It applies, to some extent, to almost every institution we have. It applies to education and social work, to government and business, and to religious institutions as well. People are stuck in all these places, and they can neither get out of them nor find a loving quality of presence within them. Love demands defenselessness, and in many if not most of our workplaces that is just too high a price.

The kid in the newspaper was named Stevie, and he was eight. I was thirty-nine and lived by myself in a house that I owned. For a short time our local newspaper featured an orphan every week. Later they would transition to adoptable pets, but for a while it was orphans, children your could foster and possibly adopt of everything worked out, the profiles were short, maybe two or three hundred words. This was what I knew: Stevie liked going to school. He made friends easily. He promised he would make his bed every morning. He hoped that if he were very good we could have his own dog, and if he were very, very good, his younger brother could be adopted with him. Stevie was Black. I knew nothing else. The picture of him was a little bigger than a postage stamp. He smiled. I studied his face at my breakfast table until something in me snapped. I paced around my house, carrying the folded newspaper. I had two bedrooms. I had a dog. I had so much more than plenty. In return he would make his bed, try his best in school. That was all he had to bargain with: himself. By the time Karl came for dinner after work I was nearly out of my mind. “I want to adopt him,” I said. Karl read the profile. He looked at the picture. “You want to be his mother?” “It’s not about being his mother. I mean, sure, if I’m his mother that’s fine, but it’s like seeing a kid waving from the window of a burning house, saying he’ll make his bed if someone will come and get him out. I can’t leave him there.” “We can do this,” Karl said. We can do this. I started to calm myself because Karl was calm. He was good at making things happen. I didn’t have to want children in order to want Stevie. In the morning I called the number in the newspaper. They took down my name and address. They told me they would send the preliminary paperwork. After the paperwork was reviewed, there would be a series of interviews and home visits. “When do I meet Stevie?” I asked. “Stevie?” “The boy in the newspaper.” I had already told her the reason I was calling. “Oh, it’s not like that,” the woman said. “It’s a very long process. We put you together with the child who will be your best match.” “So where’s Stevie?” She said she wasn’t sure. She thought that maybe someone had adopted him. It was a bait and switch, a well-written story: the bed, the dog, the brother. They knew how to bang on the floor to bring people like me out of the woodwork, people who said they would never come. I wrapped up the conversation. I didn’t want a child, I wanted Stevie. It all came down to a single flooding moment of clarity: he wouldn’t live with me, but I could now imagine that he was in a solid house with people who loved him. I put him in the safest chamber of my heart, he and his twin brother in twin beds, the dog asleep in Stevie’s arms. And there they stayed, going with me everywhere until I finally wrote a novel about them called Run. Not because I thought it would find them, but because they had become too much for me to carry. I had to write about them so that I could put them down.

Ultimately, more than eighty arms control specialists signed a letter defending the Iran deal as a “net plus for international nuclear nonproliferation efforts” and warning that “unilateral action by the United States, especially on the basis of unsupported contentions of Iranian cheating, would isolate the United States.” But that message didn’t penetrate the Trump administration, which continued to publicly excoriate Iran. The time of specialists playing a formative role in foreign policy, some career officials feared, may have passed too. Just days after assuming power, the new administration had, of course, fired its top in-house expert on nonproliferation. SO IT WAS THAT, on a cold Sunday in January 2017, Tom Countryman found himself clearing out his office at the State Department. It was the end of thirty-five years of service, but he was unsentimental. “There was so much to do,” he said with a shrug. “I’m not sure I pondered it.” On most Sundays, the Department was eerily empty. But on this one, Countryman wasn’t alone. Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy, after forty-four years in the Foreign Service, was cleaning out his desk as well. The two graying diplomats took a break from their boxes of paperwork and family photos to reminisce. Kennedy had been in the thick of the Iraq War as chief of staff for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Countryman had been in Egypt as that country joined the Gulf War. It was an improbably quiet end to a pair of high-stakes careers: memories and empty desks, as the State Department stood still.

Every Monday and Friday night, leaving us with awful suppers to reheat, our mum didn’t work late shifts at the printworks. She went to an office in Shoreditch. And from there, by radio, by note, by telephone and letters, she exchanged messages with Miss Carter and Mrs. Henderson and Queenie and others like them on what she called ‘humanitarian war work’. She’d never met any of them in person. ‘I can’t tell you any more details. It’s secret work. How you know even this much is really quite beyond me,’ she admitted. ‘I worked most of it out myself,’ I told her. She might’ve hidden it from me all this time, but I wasn’t stupid. ‘Sounds like Sukie did too.’ ‘Your sister spied on me,’ Mum replied bitterly. ‘She stole paperwork, listened in to private conversations. She was very foolish to get caught up in something she knew nothing about.’ ‘She did know about it, though. What Hitler’s doing really got to her. She was desperate to do something about it. All that post from Devon? It wasn’t from Queenie. Those were letters from the lighthouse, written by Ephraim, who feels the same about the Jewish people as Sukie does.’ ‘It was stupid, impulsive behaviour,’ Mum argued, ‘of the sort your sister’s very good at.’ Yet to me she had missed a vital point. ‘You know Sukie wanted to help you, don’t you? She saw how ill you’d got over Dad. By standing in for you on this job, she was making sure you’d get some rest, like the doctor said you should.’ ‘I might’ve known you’d stick up for your sister,’ Mum remarked. ‘But it didn’t help me – it worried me sick!’ ‘It did help thirty-two refugees, though,’ I reminded her. ‘She was lucky she didn’t get arrested straight away.’ Mum went on as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘When I found out that night what she’d done, I was all for going after her, hauling her back and locking her in her bedroom, till this frightful war was over if I had to. But it was too late by then. She was already halfway to France.’ ‘You knew the night she disappeared?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ ‘And admit that I do undercover work and Sukie was doing it too?’ Mum cried. ‘Good grief, Olive, it’s secret business. It was too dangerous to tell you. There’s a war on, remember!’ ‘People always use that excuse,’ I muttered. It stunned me that Mum had known all this time. But then, hadn’t there been signs? The looks in our kitchen between her and Gloria, the refusal to talk about Sukie, the bundling us off out of the way – to here, the very place Sukie might, with any luck, show up. It was a clever way of making sure we knew the moment she set foot on British soil again.

The next day, we dropped my mom at her part-time waitress job. Before she got out of the car, she looked at my dad and said, “We have to apply for assistance, Tom.” “We’ll be back on our feet before they deal with all the paperwork,” he said. “Still.” “Plus we probably make too much money to qualify for help.” “Still.” They looked at each other for a few long seconds. Finally my dad nodded. We went to an office called Social Services to find out about help. My dad filled out lots of forms while Robin and I sat on hard orange chairs. Then we went to three hardware stores, where my dad put in applications for work. My dad grumbled about all the gas we used up. To cheer him up, I said maybe we could feed the car water instead. He laughed a little then. “Not having enough work is tough work,” my dad told my mom when she joined us in the car after her shift. He took a deep breath and blew it out hard, like he was facing a birthday cake with too many candles. “Dad?” I said. “I’m kind of hungry.” “Me too, buddy,” he said. “Me too.” “Almost forgot,” my mom said, reaching into her tote bag. “I grabbed some of the bagels that the chef was about to throw out.” She pulled out a white paper sack. “They’re pretty stale, though. And they’re pumpernickel.

Too much paperwork, she began the mental mantra, too much paperwork, breathe in slowly, too much paperwork, breathe out.

1. You might want to perform an audit of the paperwork your sales team is required to fill out to determine whether it is actually needed to produce sales. If it does not directly contribute to sales, get rid of it. If the paperwork is providing the company with necessary information, analyze how you can go about obtaining that information without burdening the sales team. By removing that burden from the sales team, could you see a pickup in selling time that will translate to an increase in sales?   2. Have you had to reduce territories, products, or rep income? What was the effect on your team?   3. Do you allow your team members the right to fail? What constitutes too much failure for an individual, and where do you draw the line? How do you communicate your policy to maintain a consistent message that is seen as fair and reasonable by your sales team?

It’s just,” He exhaled loudly and sunk further into his chair, “I had to pull a lot of strings to move here with you, you have no idea how hard it was to do that. I get here, and you’re with someone and my hopes of being with you were completely thrown out the window. I mean, I obviously was wrong, but I’d always thought you knew how I felt about you and thought you felt the same. So you can imagine how pissed off I was when I found out how wrong I was.” “We were just friends though, I don’t know how many times you and I both said that.” “No, to you we were just friends. Yes, you were my best friend, but that wasn’t it for me. You don’t realize how much time I spent with your dad talking about you. He knew exactly how I felt, he knew why I wanted to follow you to California, he was the one who helped get my transfer pushed through.” “Sir did?” I deadpanned, “The same guy who wouldn’t let me wear women’s clothes?” “Yep.” “I thought you said he wouldn’t let you date Harper when you were in his unit, so why would he help you follow her here?” Brandon asked calmly. “Uh yeah he did, but he was also the one to suggest the transfer.” “What?” Who was this guy Carter was talking about, and what did he do with my dad? “I know, shocked me too. I’d already been thinking of a way to move out here when he called me into his office that Monday after you got your acceptance letter. He said something like, ‘You know, Harper’s leaving for California soon, she’ll be near Pendleton. If you were there, you wouldn’t be in my unit anymore.’ And then he gave me that look, you know the one where he expects you to know what he’s thinking? Then he said he’d start the paperwork if I was serious about being with you, and that was that.” “That just seems …” I trailed off not knowing what word to use. “So unlike Sir?” “Yeah.” “Shocked

And from what I remember about our casting meeting, his eyes kept circling back to you.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said in as light a voice as she could manage, as if they were joking about something that would never, ever happen in a million years. “Well,” George said after a pause that was just a little too long for her comfort, “I think we both know that if the beautiful and talented and filthy rich Smith Sullivan is smart enough to try to stick his hands up your skirt, you won’t stand a chance.” She hated knowing her friend and colleague was right, hated it so much that as she grabbed a stack of notes on her desk, she tried to put a stop to all of his nonsense by saying, in her sternest, most businesslike tone, “If you’re done speculating over whether or not Smith Sullivan wants to stick his hands, or any other body part, up my skirt—or if I have strong enough superpowers to resist him—perhaps we can now discuss the details of Tatiana’s recent commercial offer.” A creak from her office doorway made her finally lift her gaze from her paperwork…to stare straight into Smith’s amused eyes. Oh, God. Oh, no. Could he have heard what she’d just said? About her skirt, and his hands, and… Yes, she realized with a hard thunk of her heart as it careened down to the bottom of her stomach. Of course he’d heard every last word of it. Why else would he look so amused…and, quite possibly, delighted? “George, I’ll need to call you back in a few minutes.” “Oooh, you sound tense. And more than a little breathless. A movie star must have walked into the room.” George was obviously giddy over it. “Why don’t you just leave your phone on speaker so I can hear his voice—just in case he says all those naughty things I know we’re both hoping he’ll say.” She hung up on Tatiana’s agent and immediately stood up so that she and Smith would be on even ground. Well, as even as they could be, given the six or so inches he had on her even in her heels. “You didn’t need to hang up so quickly for me,” he drawled in a voice that didn’t try to be sexy. It just was. “I know how busy you are,” she replied. And it was true. As star, director, producer and screenwriter of Gravity, she wasn’t sure how he’d managed more than a handful of hours of sleep a night since production began. And yet, he didn’t look the least bit tired. Instead, he looked even more handsome than he usually did. Clearly, he wore smug well. Because she knew damn well just how smug he had to be feeling after what he’d heard her say to George.

I’d recently told her that I’d become weary of my work, for all the same boring reasons privileged people get sick of their white-collar jobs: too many meetings, too much email, and too much paperwork.

Lily, our last girl, had rather a clever habit of using that pan for two vegetables at once” meant You’re making too much mess. “Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea, Will” actually meant I have no idea what to say to you. “I think I’ve got some paperwork that needs sorting out” meant You’re being rude, and I’m going to leave the room.

A couple recently came to my office. Let’s call them Mark and Elizabeth Schuler. They came in for a consultation at Elizabeth’s request. Mark’s best friend was a stockbroker who had handled the couple’s investment portfolio for decades. All they wanted from me was a second opinion. If all went well, they planned to stop working within five years. After a quick chat about their goals, I organized the mess of financial paperwork they’d brought and set about assessing their situation. As my team and I prepared their “Retirement Map Review,” it was immediately apparent the Schulers were carrying significant market risk. We scheduled a follow-up appointment for two weeks later. When they returned, I asked them to estimate their comfortable risk tolerance. In other words, how much of their savings could they comfortably afford to have exposed to stock market losses? Elizabeth laughed at the question. “We’re not comfortable losing any of it,” she said. I had to laugh too. Of course, no one wants to lose any of their money. But with assets housed in mutual funds, 401(k)s, and stocks, there’s always going to be some measure of risk, not to mention fees to maintain such accounts. We always stand to lose something. So how much could they tolerate losing and still be okay to retire? The Schulers had to think about that for a while. After some quick calculations and hurried deliberation, they finally came up with a number. “I guess if we’re just roughly estimating,” Mark said, “I could see us subjecting about 10 percent of our retirement savings to the market’s ups and downs and still being all right.” Can you guess what percentage of their assets were at risk? After a careful examination of the Schulers’ portfolio, my team and I discovered 100 percent of their portfolio was actually invested in individual stocks—an investment option with very high risk! In fact, a large chunk of the Schulers’ money was invested in Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), a utility company that has been around for over one hundred years. Does that name sound familiar? When I met with the Schulers, PG&E stock was soaring. But you may remember the company name from several 2019 news headlines in which the electric and natural gas giant was accused of negligence that contributed to 30 billion dollars’ worth of damage caused by California wild fires. In the wake of that disaster, the company’s stock dropped by more than 60 percent in a matter of months. That’s how volatile individual stocks can be.

into his face, inches from my own. “What did you have in mind?” His lips curved, and the bell rang over the front door as someone entered. “What do you think you’re doing? Who is that?” The voice from across the room was all too familiar. I almost dropped the paint roller, but Shawn kept his hand tightly wrapped around mine even as he straightened, shifting his torso a few inches away from mine. I didn’t have to look at the intruder. I’d know Bronson’s voice anywhere. What was he doing in Silver Springs? It’s not like it was only an afternoon drive from Chicago. I turned to face him. As usual, he was decked out in his suit and carrying his laptop bag. As mad and hurt as I was over what happened, I still sucked in a little breath when I saw how terrific he looked. Then I clenched my jaw—I was not going there again. Shawn released my hand, but not my waist, nor did he move away. “Bronson, what are you doing here?” I stared at him. He approached, his actions indicating he thought he had a right to intrude. “I came to talk some sense into you. What is he doing here?” He gestured to Shawn. “He came to help me paint. There’s a lot to do before I can open this place for business.” The warmth of Shawn’s hand on my waist grew scalding, but I didn’t shake him off. It felt good having someone behind me, supporting me as I faced down Bronson. And I was amazed he hadn’t stepped forward to interfere. No way would Bronson have let me handle a confrontation without thinking he had to be the big tough man in charge. “Who’s the suit?” Shawn asked. “I’m her fiancé, Bronson DeMille the third.” As always, his introduction was self-important. Usually his attitude just made me roll my eyes, even if only on the inside, but right now I found it more than a minor irritation. Shawn let go and moved away from me, as if I were suddenly contagious. “You’re engaged?” “No, he’s my ex-fiancé, who became my ex when I caught him cheating on me.” I missed having Shawn’s hand on my hip, but decided it was as well. I turned my attention back to the jerk I once thought I would marry. “What do you want, Bronson?” Shawn’s defection seemed to give Bronson courage and he walked over, taking my free hand. “Sweetheart, that was all a misunderstanding. You know how much I love you.” Okay, this was an approach I hadn’t anticipated. But I hadn’t expected to see him at all, so I supposed I shouldn’t have expectations about how he would act. “Really? So I find you sucking face with Karen—made all the worse by the fact that I hate her—and I’m supposed to know that it’s not important, that you still love me? After all, it’s just one of those things that sometimes happens before a guy gets married.” I let the sarcasm ooze and drip. He took the paint roller and set it in the tray, then moved to take my other hand. I snatched both hands out of his reach and stepped back, closer to Shawn. Bronson looked hurt. “Tess, it was a mistake—a major one—but I promise it won’t happen again. You belong in Chicago, not in this backwater town making cupcakes and brownies for school children.” There was more than a little sneer in his voice. “Gourmet cupcakes and brownies, and it won’t only be for children. I’m going to enjoy what I do here, having my own space, doing things my way.” Even if I am terrified of the paperwork and taxes and balancing the books. “I already have a few clients and am working out an agreement to do wedding cakes for the new hotel in town.

Look, Dad. I’m okay. I like this girl. Everything’s normal. “Only my father,” I say to Tina, “would imagine that anyone could find paperwork arousing.” “What?” Her smile is a touch too wide, a little too faked. “Don’t tell me your media training didn’t cover this, either.” I set the stack of papers on the flat surface of my desk and gesture Tina to sit in the leather-bound executive chair. “What am I supposed to say, then? Come on, baby. It’s a nondisclosure agreement. You’ll like it. I promise.” She gives me an unimpressed look. “God,” she says. “And I thought you were supposed to be a good liar. That’s not how you do it.” She bites her lip and then she leans toward me. Her eyelashes sweep down, and when she talks, she lowers her voice toward sultry. “I don’t know, Blake.” She bites her lip and reaches gingerly for the papers, stroking her thumb along the edge. “It’s so…big. I’m not sure it will fit.” I almost choke. She looks up with a touch of a smile. Fuck. I started this. “We’ll go nice and slow.” I pull a chair beside her and sit down, and very slowly take a pen from the holder. “Tell me if it hurts and I can stop anytime. I promise.” “Be gentle.” I know we’re just joking. I know this doesn’t mean anything. Still, my body doesn’t know this is a show when I lean toward her. I don’t feel like I’m lying when I inhale the sent of her hair. It goes straight to my groin, a stab of lust. “Trust me,” I murmur. She’s sitting in my chair. She’s smaller than me and all that dark leather surrounds her, blending in with her hair. But when she looks up, tilting her head toward me, she doesn’t seem tiny. She pulls the first paper-clipped section of pages to her, glances at the first paragraph, and wrinkles her nose. “Ouch,” she says in a much less sensual tone of voice. “It hurts already.” “It basically says that if you tell anyone anything about Cyclone business, we get one of your kidneys,” I translate helpfully. “How sweet.” She hasn’t looked up from the document. “Do your lawyers know you summarize their forms like that?” “Disclose two things,” I say, “and we get two kidneys.” “Mmm. Playing rough. What happens if I disclose three? You shut down my dialysis machine?” “You get a commemorative Cyclone pen,” I say mock-seriously. “Come on. We’re not monsters.” She cracks a smile at that. She’s not one of those girls who always smiles, and that means that when she does smile, it means something. Her whole face lights up and my breath catches at the sight. I lean in, as if I could breathe in her amusement. But then she drops her head and goes back to reading. When she finishes, she signs with a flourish. “What’s next?” she says. “Bring it on.” I hand over the next few pages. She holds it up and looks at me. “Don’t lie to me, baby. I bet you make all the girls you bring in here sign this.” You know what? I have never before found SEC regulations this sexy. I lean close to her. “No way,” I murmur. “This is just for you.” “Really?” She manages that look of hurt skepticism so well. I reach out, almost touching her cheek—until I remember that this isn’t real. “No,” I whisper back. “Not really. Everyone does sign it; it’s company policy.” “Oh, too bad.” She’s still reading the page. “I was hoping you had a selective disclosure just for me.” Selective, I realize, is a sexy word when drawn out the way she does it, her tongue touching her lips on the l sound. So is disclosure. “I can disclose,” I hear myself saying. “Selectively.” “Maybe you can give it to me in a material and nonpublic place.” I lean toward her. “You know me. I put the inside in insider trading.” She’s still holding the pen poised above the paper. I touch my finger to the cap and then slowly slide it down the barrel until my hand meets hers. A shock of electricity hits me, followed by a jolt of lust.