Every time I come back home, I go through my pockets and I have pieces of paper in them. Not the ones you trade for things like coffee and other vital supplies.

No, just paper. They’re folded but in no way should be considered pocket origami, an art form that Erwin might say exists but doesn’t exist at the same time because of the nature of pockets.

No, just bits of papers with numbers on them. Accountant pornography, though everything is digital. They’re receipts, and everyone seems to want to hand me one.

In Trinidad and Tobago, you get 2 receipts. You get the receipt for whatever you buy, plus the receipt for the electronic transaction being processed at the point of sale. They have little machines that connect to other machines through the internet, and when you insert or tap your debit or credit card, it generates a transactional receipt just in case you were wondering why people were giving you stuff.

In fact, if the internet access for the little machine is down, you get a receipt for the transaction not happening with the error on the piece of paper so that you know that the machine had an internet issue and could not connect. It might even tell you that you’re broke. You have it all documented on a piece of paper, handed to you with the actual receipt for whatever product or service you got.

So you have these pieces of paper, and the idea is that when you get home, you’ll neatly organize them into something an accountant can regurgitate into spreadsheets so that you can get tax breaks on the stuff you’re supposed to buy. If it’s not tax deductible, it’s just something that I theorize accountants use to stuff pillows, mattresses, and perhaps even build furniture from if they know someone in the adhesives industry.

The ones with heat paper are fun. On a hot day you can leave them on the dashboard of a car and watch it all turn black.

There are some rules I have found internationally, too.

For example, no matter where you go, if you buy a toothbrush the receipt(s) for it will be of sufficient size to gift wrap the toothbrush package.

Another example: the more things you have to do, the more likely the cashier will have to fumble around with loading a fresh paper roll into the machine so that you can get your receipt.

Also, cashiers can sometimes get really upset if you don’t take your receipt, leaving them to deal with a piece of paper that they don’t want. I think that’s fair play.

Mostly I get receipts in Trinidad because I don’t want the security guard tackling me on the way out with no evidence that I actually purchased the item. Once I walk out of the store, they’re pretty much useless as a security guard shield.

All these pieces of paper. I don’t really want them, but I am an accidental collector.

I did do some research, and was planning for this to be full of links to sites that talk about the waste of receipts, that some of the receipts aren’t of recycled paper and some can’t be recycled, but that all seems just a bit over the top given the real issue most people have is… pockets full of receipts.

Maybe women of both biological genders – did I get that right? I don’t know – have it in their purses. Maybe they hand their receipts to the guy who wants to have sex with them, who follows them dutifully around collecting the receipts in the hope of… well, in the hope of something that probably shouldn’t generate a receipt.