It is the ageless challenge in every office – how do you get people to stop printing crap they don’t need? At the end of every workday, there are printouts – Websites, Google maps, 100-page reports – sitting on the output trays – and there they stay for days, weeks, until someone finally tosses them unused into the bin. So how do you convince people to print only what they need? And then get up to retrieve what they’ve printed? The initial solution at my office was to make it as easy as possible to print – have printers at every corner, make sure each one is fully stocked with toner and paper, and ensure that their network names are so descriptive that anyone could find the closest printer, even in the dark, even if they were temporarily blinded (e.g., Color Printer to the Left of the Water Cooler with the Aladdin sticker on the Rear Output Tray).

These strategies did not solve the problem – and I would contend that we (and all offices) should go in the opposite direction – make it as difficult as possible to print anything. Have one computer set up to print. Put it inside a moat populated with poison frogs and hungry gharials (they do not eat humans, but they sure look intimidating). Require users to click through five icons while standing on their head and then enter a code that changes every day to get to the printer dialogue box. Force them to think – do I really need to print out this Mac and Cheese recipe? Is it really worth all the trouble? … If you make it too easy, they will always click Print. They won’t even think about it. Nature does not wire its inhabitants to deal with excess. In the face of plenty, we take more. We are all wired to struggle with scarcity – if there is plenty (or if we think there’s plenty) of printers, paper, money, oil, credit… then we will just take more.

Why did I name the character (and the story) Martin Garvin? Well, I wanted something that sounds vaguely iconic – the character of Martin Garvin is a force of nature. He is huge. And I wanted a name that could carry his weight. And to me, Martin Garvin sounds a lot like Marvin Gardens – so there’s your iconic quality.

So now there is a sample of the Martin Garvin serial online for your perusal. I will examine the problems of this mess of a story over the next few weeks or months, but one thing for sure – it was too busy. There were lots of things that I tried to throw in there, including the Russian mafia, with its ties to professional hockey as detailed in the book Red Mafiya, by Robert I. Friedman. Oh sure, it’s fun – but you have to draw the line somewhere.

I liked the TV show Six Feet Under from beginning to end, despite some sluggish periods in the arc of the series. And Alan Ball does have a tendency to slip little profundities into his dialogue that get people nodding. Sure, it was contrived. I mean, when was the last time anything profound came out of a conversation you had with a coworker, a friend, even a family member? But still, I found myself nodding along with everyone else.

One that stuck with me was near the end of the series, with Claire, who talked about her relief when she left art school to be an office temp, the noble career of Donna Noble. Relief at the prospect of not having to create, not having the pressure to make something of value even when you know 90 percent of everything is crud (thank you Sturgeon). I am paraphrasing for Claire – or maybe I am projecting. I never thought about it before – fight the impulse, save yourself the frustration, and live a normal life. Do what smart people do in the morning and on weekends – and don’t spend your spare time staring at abysmal stories on a computer screen. Because it is a slog. With no guarantee that it will be meaningful to anyone. I guess the mere persistence of this site means I haven’t reached that point yet.