I'd like to thank presidential candidate Mitt Romney for taking a moment last night to raise binder awareness. But while most of the Internet is occupied today with the women Mitt is putting in those binders and how those women got into his binders to begin with, I think we need to step back for a moment and talk about a larger issue surrounding binders. And that is that they are fucking terrible.

Seriously, binders are the worst. Have you ever been handed a binder at work? Has there ever been anything inside a binder that you've wanted to read, ever? Holy shit, no. Every binder should have a warning label on it that says CAUTION: BORING SHIT INSIDE. A binder inevitably contains all manner of legal briefs and call reports and confusing bar graphs and reams of inscrutable tax data. I had to file shit in binders at my first office job. Day after day, I had to put competitive marketing printouts into big yellow binders, with those fucking tabs separating everything, and then file those binders away where no one would ever use them again.

And it's not just what's inside the binder that's horrible. Consider the binder itself. It's basically a bear trap with flaps. Every time I open the jaws of a binder, I imagine it slamming shut, lancing through my finger, and giving me tetanus. IT WANTS TO EAT ME. Certain binders require a Herculean amount of strength to open. Half the time, the jaws will shut down on the paper instead of right at the punch hole and then your shit is mangled forever. Or sometimes, you'll only get the rings through two of the holes and have to repeat the process all over again.

There's nothing user friendly about a binder. No one sits down in a forest meadow to peacefully read one. They're bulky. They take up oceans of real estate on a bookshelf for no good reason. They're almost always too thick at the spine and then too narrow along the edges. You're basically jamming a doorstop into a shelf. And you can't put anything on them. They're too lopsided and the surface of a binder is too slick. Your shit will go sliding off of it in a matter of seconds. What good is something if I can't put a glass of whiskey on it?

If you have a job and you have to deal with binders on a regular basis, I can tell you that you probably hate your job and are actively scheming to quit that job so that you can go to botany school. And you probably work with a crazy person, because only crazy people want to do any kind of work that involves putting shit into binders. I support you in your clandestine desire to escape. We've come too far as a civilization to deal with these horrible fucking things a second longer. I want you to round up all the binders you can find and BURN THEM. BURN THEM AND SET US ALL FREE FROM THE TYRANNY OF THREE-RINGED MADNESS. Binders are for Satan's paper.

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