It must have been a year ago, now, that I wandered around Office Depot and the stationary departments of a few department stores, wondering where on earth they were hiding their lettter-sized hanging folders. Our move to Thailand had significantly increased the amount of paper that we felt needed to be filed away. Alas, I never found those hanging folders, and ended up buying some really long ones that were available in vast quantities, and started up a second filing system in another set of drawers. Not efficient, but it works.
I didn't really think of my hunt for 8.5"x11" paper products again until recently, when my kiddo used up the last of the printer paper that we brought with us to Canada and I had to stock the printer with paper from the pack that Chris had picked up the last time we were out shopping. The print quality of the letter I printed out was really poor, and the subsequent documents that I printed came out similarly. I made a mental note to clean our inkjet's print heads one of these days.
Then, it struck me that it looked like the text on my printed pages looked, well, stretched out. How silly. A day or so later, I was putting some of my kiddo's drawings away, and noticed that some of the sheets of paper my stack were actually bigger than the others. That was when I was enlightened that paper labeled "A4" is not the same as "letter" of "8.5x11". Argh.
I guess I could have my folks send me some normal-sized paper from home, but it just seemed easier to join the rest of the world in the A4 Paper Revolution and set that size to be our printer's default. And now I understand about those ridiculous letter-sized hanging folders ...
