Print Everything Before Friday

The certainty arrived on a Monday and behaved like a chore I had already agreed to: back everything up. Print the contracts. Print the timesheets. It had that specific texture of an obligation, as if a meeting had happened and I had missed it but the action items still applied to me.

I resented it. Printing things in our office was practically an act of vandalism — we were paperless, proudly, the whole firm's records on the building's own servers, a cloud migration perpetually scheduled for next quarter. But the nag would not lift. Tuesday I backed up my project files to a personal drive, feeling furtive. Wednesday I printed the three live contracts I managed, plus the payment schedules, and hid the folder in my drawer like contraband. Thursday, on the way out, the nag made me go back and print one more thing — the change-order log — and then, finally, it went quiet, the way a filled-in form goes quiet.