Notes from Down Under

When you move to a new country, you know to expect different things — different currency (AUD), different culture (laid back), different language (arvo) — but you don’t expect the small things to be different too.

Like paper.

I love writing things down because it helps my brain process things more easily You’ll usually never find me without my journal or, at the very least, a pen — it’s a lot easier to find “paper” (hello cocktail napkin), than a pen (lipstick doesn’t work quite as well as it does in the movies). I like keeping a clipboard with me if I also have my laptop; my clipboard is where I jot down my action items (something that tends to get longer and longer throughout the day) and scribble random thoughts as they pop up so as to not forget them.

I ran out of paper one day (I’d brought a stack with me from the US) and rather than live like a dirtbag and take it from the library printers, went to the office supplies store like an adult to go buy a block of printing paper.

Imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find normal printer paper.

?!?!

All of the regular copy paper was abnormally long. I searched through the shelves but could only find this A4 size — there wasn’t anything that matched my 8.5 x 11” back in the U.S. So, I shrugged my shoulders and went off to the register to buy this weirdly oblong paper.

Back home I mentioned this strange discrepancy to my flatmate, who then looked at me funny, “You know A4 is the standard size and used by the rest of the world, right?”

Nooooooooo. That can’t be!

Sure enough, it is. Ladies and gentlemen and people of the world, I’ve been brainwashed to think that the US is at the center of the world and all of its customs and traditions and practices are the only, the right, and the best way to do things. It was a very humbling moment for me, to realize that I’ve been conditioned to believe that if it’s how Americans do it, then that most be how the rest of the world does it, because we’re (Americans) are always right.

Turns out the US is the weird one here. Australia, like most of the rest of the world, uses A4 paper because it adheres to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 216 standard for paper sizes (oh is that what ISO means? I see that on cameras too. And oh, there’s an international organization that dictates standards for the entire world?!). However the US and Canada primarily use the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard (classic, of course America creates and follows its own American standards), with “Letter” size (hello 8.5 x 11”) being the standard paper size. There’s an international organization to help promote consistency in printing and document handling across borders, but the US (and Canada — noooo, why did you?) creates its own rules.

At least now here in Australia I have an extra 0.7 inches to work with (go put that out of your brain, you dirty mind!).