We don’t talk enough about how fanfiction writers love to give character large amounts of non-specific paperwork they hate doing
say more pls
Yeah sure why not.
So most stories take place when Events are Happening, and this means that no matter what kind of job the characters have, they’re probably not too focused on them. Fanfics, on the other hand, often show the down time. Which means that the writer has to figure out what the hell these characters do in their jobs. Unless the characters have a job the author understands or knows well, the author is often at a loss for what to have the character doing.
So they sit them at a desk and give them paperwork. What is the paperwork for? Rarely specified. It is Paper Work for the characters Important Adult Job they have and they need to read or sign it or something. And there’s always a line about how Character Hates Paperwork. Doesn’t matter if Character is a Mafia Boss or a General or a Diplomat, here they are in an office trying to get out of Doing Paperwork.
There’s also a sense of, like, humor and mundanity that comes with it. Like the examples above, it always particularly stands out to me when a dangerous individual is griping about some paper they need to sign or something. The less you can picture Character doing paperwork, all the better to force it upon them. If Character is saddled with Paperwork, they’re usually now concerned about the physical damages their motley crew causes, because damage = More Paperwork.
Anyway I just think it’s fun or funny, Sephiroth doing paper work and Sawada Tsunayoshi doing paper work and this just in, Tony Stark is doing paperwork. Sorry, Phoenix Wright can’t play right now. Yeah, it’s paperwork.
A very non-exhaustive list of actual paperwork they could be completing/reviewing/approving, in no particular order:
Timesheets
Expense reports
Requisition requests
Budget justifications
Payroll
Performance evaluations
Incident reports
After action reviews / post-mortem analyses
Incident Action Plans
Contracts
Contract proposals / grant applications
Reports / briefings
Your Royalty or Nobles in your feudal society should be doing this constantly unless you want to show how they're losing the kingdom and about to be usurped or overthrown.
petitions, speech-writing, complaints, requests, assignations, disputes, judiciary forms, declarations that need signing off on, matters requiring the Royal seal, matters requiring a royal endorsement, pardons, judgments, invitations, rebuttals, census data, crop yields projected or actual, livestock records, water rights, Sumptuary laws, taxes taxes taxes...
solid point there!
even when the royalty look like they're just fucking off to have fun, they're doing Socially Mandated Fuck-Off and Have Fun Time
Tournaments? Gotta show you're manly and virile through sport, or the nobles will supplant you. Feasts? Gotta show you're wealthy through conspicuous consumption, or the nobles will supplant you. Patronizing the arts? Gotta show you're cultured and erudite, or the nobles will laugh at you behind your back and probably supplant you.
Lawyer here. Here’s some more mundane/modern ones for you:
Invoices.
Intake sheets (information about new clients. The one for my firm is 13 pages and requires an hour long meeting. Then you have to do something with the info gathered)
Data entry for invoices and intake sheets.
Billing. (More involved than timesheets because you’re justifying to clients why you’re getting paid so much).
Form letters.
Taxes. Including 1099s for any contracted work.
Bank statements/accounting spreadsheets. Gotta track how expenses are trending.
Insurance documents.
General messages. Lots of office still use a paper system for missed calls and “important” stuff because it just works better than emails and chats for some people.
Memos. Big enough office to have at least one attorney on payroll? You’re getting memos about every legal question and concern and contract. It’s how we’re trained to communicate in formal settings.
And if you want to get into modern military, the forms are numbered, and people will refer to them by either their actual name, or the number. (Have you filled out the 4187 for this? Yes, I filled out the personnel action form.)
The military has so many forms.
If you want to add a rage level, there’s the Regular Paperwork and then the special hell of Fuckup Paperwork.
Cause there’s the invoice, and the follow up invoice and the we are about to have a problem follow-up invoice.
There’s the incident report and then the I swear I yelled at that worker about this don’t be mad at me if they do it again second warning documentation
The requisition form and the it has been six months now get me the fucking thing or you’re gonna hear from Cindy escalations form.
Paperwork has layers and protocols and backups.
For law firms, there's also the 'I am asking nicely for you to send me this legally mandated document' and then the follow-up 'My please was a social nicety, I am no longer asking, I am telling you to send me this document or explain to a court why you refuse to do so' which, depending on the type of law, can fill a significant amount of the day
Other legal paperwork may include!
-Case Review! This applies in some areas of law but it's basically checking through the case, seeing the status with your own stuff and the court's stuff, often writing a brief summary of your review, and making an action plan for next steps. Depending on the type of law and where the case is in progress this can take anywhere from 5 minutes ("ok nothing new in the court file, nothing's changed on our end, we're still waiting on the court") to, uh, several hours or days ("we're preparing for hearing and I need a full summary of every single thing including an index.")
-Indexing! This is where you take the evidence in a case and make a markup reference document with every citation you think you might need (e.g. a spreadsheet with like... Evidence ID 5F, page 32, [date] date of service, x-ray report, and then a description of what the x-ray report says). In large firms this can often be gruntwork and may be done by attorneys or paralegals. Most attorneys hate it, some of us love it, and some of us love it in moderation. For instance, I love indexing in moderation, and another unit will sometimes give me overflow work where it's like "ok these are 9,000 pages of medical records and we need to know which providers signed things on which dates" (for investigating billing fraud for, like, hey buddy you were at a conference that day how'd you see a patient???). Not all cases get indexed. As an example, if it's like a 5-page major fuck up record? No indexing needed. 9,000 pages? Indexing very much needed.
