Paperwork Punishment

He's got two problems; He misses his girlfriend, and he's got to do all that paperwork all over again because he's been signing her name instead of his.

Paperwork. It always seems like there's a mountain of it to do. And with the exception of some highly... unusual... personalities, most people dread having to fill out paperwork.

So, when rules are bent, broken, or ignored, or someone has caused an inordinate amount of property damage, sometimes the powers that be decide that the most effective form of punishment is making the offending party fill out the corresponding forms.

It could be the result of a bet, serving as the punishment for the loser.

In a truly sadistic setting, something unfortunate will happen to destroy the paperwork just before completion, necessitating starting over.

Of course, filling out the paperwork is only one possibility. There's also the filing of the paperwork, making sure it goes where it needs to go. And of course, one could be forced to check over others' paperwork as a form of punishment, such as being assigned the job of a clerk responsible for filing away all the paperwork of others, after making sure it's correct.

In some institutions, this task may be wholly unnecessary, and thus a menial task that can inflict only minimal damage if done incorrectly, making malicious disobedience a meaningless act for someone who decides to attend to their punishment with an eye to revenge. Indeed, in more modern settings, where 99.9% of paperwork is likely digital, having someone go over and file physical copies is probably the most demeaning, useless task possible to assign as a punishment.

An Obstructive Bureaucrat or Department of Major Vexation can demand endless paperwork as a roadblock for heroes and villains alike. Can also be the fate of a Pen-Pushing President.

Compare The Dreaded Toilet Duty for another thing that's necessary but often used as punishment. Also compare Writing Lines for a similar punishment where someone is forced to repeatedly write the same phrase ad nauseum.

See also Soul-Crushing Desk Job and Post-Injury Desk Job.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu: The first episode opens with the Vice-Principal showing a large amount of property damage reports and disciplinary actions being filled out for the last week, all the result of Sosuke Sagara, whom the Vice-Principal describes as a "chronic property wrecker" (He's not wrong). The Principal patiently explains that Sosuke was raised in one war-torn region after another, and it's their job as educators to guide him to live a more stable life in a peaceful society. Her willingness to overlook the paperwork has absolutely nothing to do with the rather sizeable donation that came from Mithril when Sosuke enrolled in the school.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: During the more lighthearted first arc of the series, we get a glimpse of how much paperwork Misato has to deal with in her role as Operations Director of NERV, by which we mean literal mountains. She certainly thinks that it's punishment in episode nine of the show when she has to file after-action reports of an operation gone humiliatingly FUBAR.
• Snow White with the Red Hair: Prince Zen Wisteria spent far too long away from the castle, and there is a large stack of paperwork on his desk waiting for him upon his return. Downplayed in that his retainers, Kiki and Mitsuhide make him take a break because he's begun writing Shirayuki instead of his own name on all of his paperwork.

Literature

• Ciaphas Cain: Discussed. Cain once mentions that, theoretically, his authority as an Imperial Guard commissar to execute underperforming personnel extends even to Lord General Zyvan. However, besides the fact Cain has no reason to want to, the paperwork he'd have to fill out after executing a Lord General Militant would be a special kind of Hell all by itself.
• Fear And Trembling: The European girl Amélie works in a Japanese office, and inadvertently breaks every rule in the very strict Japanese culture of obedience. As a result, she is made to do increasingly menial jobs, culminating in servicing the office toilets. Before this, one of the tasks she has to do is filing, which she messes up spectacularly, causing her furious supervisor to believe she did this on purpose. She is then made to double-check historic expenses accounts. She finds this task particularly daunting, and after she has stayed in the office all night doing it, she freaks out and romps naked over the desks in the deserted office.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: After Harry and Ron fly the car to Hogwarts, with disastrous results, they are given detention, and Harry is made to help the highly egotistical Professor Lockhart answer his fan mail. Lockhart tells Harry he must not expect a treat like this for future detentions.
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: After Harry has used the highly dangerous Sectumsempra spell on Malfoy, Snape gives Harry a punishment of spending every Saturday copying out archived crimes and punishments; and to twist the knife further, many of these are concerning Harry's father James, and Sirius Black.
• Incarnations of Immortality: The Magician's soul is sent to the Mundane Afterlife of Purgatory because he wasn't a good person but wasn't evil enough for Hell. His first task is to complete the forms that itemize the morality of his actions on every single day of his life.
  Magician: Where do you think the Revenue Department gets its inspiration? It will take me eternity to get through this paperwork.
• In Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle), Hammurabi's personal secretary is in Hell, desperately trying to fill out his retirement paperwork. Since he's writing in cuneiform and his section of Hell is quite hot, the mud he's writing into always dries out and hardens before he can finish, forcing him to start over.
• Johannes Cabal the Necromancer: Courtesy of a damned Paperworkaholic, the new first circle of hell is an entrance queue that requires, at a bare minimum, 2 785 forms to be completed in perfect detail without use of an eraser.
• My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!: After Raphael Walt, previously Sirius Dieke, returns to the school as part of the magic administration agency, he finds that while he escaped serious penalties for the crimes he committed under the influence of a dark magician piggybacking his soul, he now has daily mountains of paperwork to deal with.
• Discussed in The Temp. When The Temp tries to break out of a cycle of endless temporary jobs, she lands what she believes is a well-paid job, but without a contract, and earns nothing at all. After this sorry episode, she reapplies for temporary work, and her agent says she should inflict the "six-week filing punishment", but relents and gets her back into a temporary personal assistant role.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5: Discussed. In "Midnight on the Firing Line", Garibaldi stops Londo at gunpoint from going to murder G'Kar. After backing down, Londo asks whether Garibaldi would really have shot him. Garibaldi replies, "Yes, I would have. But I'm just as glad I didn't have to. The paperwork is a pain in the ass."
• Better Call Saul: Howard Hamlin punishes Kim for the debacle over the Kettleman case by sending her to document review, AKA "the cornfield." It's mind-numbing drudgery, involving close examination of thousands of legal documents, and far beneath someone of Kim's talent and education. Although she manages to get back in Howard's good graces (with Jimmy's help), she ends up their again when Jimmy makes a commercial embarrasing HHM.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
  • Invoked in "Halloween", when Jake makes a bet with Holt that he can steal the Medal of Valor from his office before midnight on Halloween, where the punishment is whoever loses will do the other's paperwork. Jake reveals that he got the rest of the detectives to help him win by promising to do their paperwork, meaning Holt is stuck doing his own, Jake's, and the rest of the squad's paperwork as punishment for underestimating them.
  • Also invoked in "Halloween II" where Holt and Jake make a second Halloween Heist bet, with Jake offering to work five weeks overtime for free if he loses and Holt agreeing, in return for doing Jake's paperwork for a week if Jake wins. This time, Holt wins, so the punishment is averted.
  • In "Into the Woods", Terry is annoyed that Jake unnecessarily broke a window during the raid, because as his higher-up he now has to spend the weekend doing the paperwork for Jake's screw-up.
  • In "Hitchcock and Scully", the titular pair are discovered to have been taking money from the Costa case without permission. As a result, the two's receive punishment from Holt in the form of "desk duty", though considering they were both actively hoping for it and then cheer after Holt announces it, it's more of an Unishment for them.
  • Invoked in "The Jimmy Jab Games II", when Hitchcock makes a deal with Jake during the Jimmy Jab Games, saying that if Jake wins, Hitchcock will have to do all his paperwork for a year.
• Comes up a couple times in JAG:
  • When Major MacKenzie tries to rescind her resignation and return to the office after leaving for the private sector in Season 3, Admiral Chegwidden reveals he never sent in the paperwork so she can return to duty. However, he assigns her menial paperwork such as filing motions and drafting legal briefs for several weeks as punishment/atonement.
  • Averted with Commander Rabb when he comes back in Season 5, though. He expects to be assigned the same scut work that Mac had to do, only for Chegwidden to chide him by pointing out Rabb left to return to flight duty as a fighter pilot and thus continued to serve his country rather than get a cushy paycheck.
• M*A*S*H: Klinger finds his leave cancelled and an absurdly large pile of paperwork waiting for him, as thirty days prior, "I-corp" changed forms for the daily reports, but Klinger didn't, and he now has a month's worth of forms to redo. As luck would have it, this is exactly when a medication for malaria causes an adverse reaction in Klinger, and the others believe he's goldbricking under protest of his cancelled leave.
• This is the capper of Vic Mackey's Humiliation Conga at the end of The Shield. After spending the whole series being the ultimate Dirty Cop and doing a lot of evil things, the final episode sees him lose everything — his friends, his reputation among the police department, his family, the works. On top of it all, the dream job/consolation prize he was promised as part of a deal he'd struck for immunity for all of his past crimes turns out to be a three-year stretch of suit-and-tie pencil-pushing, courtesy of the slightly corrupt ICE agent that he'd finessed to get that deal. And the best part is that he has to follow through on this or his deal is voided and he's pretty much guaranteed life in prison — and after that, the Feds can fire him, and thanks to all of his sins being public knowledge as a result of the Humiliation Conga, Mackey will never be able to get a job working in law enforcement ever again.

Manhua

• Parodied in one Old Master Q strip. Master Q and Mr. Chiu — depicted as Q's boss — are playing Chinese Chess and Q wins three rounds in a row, gloating away each time. Mr. Chiu then retaliates by dumping a huge stack of paperwork as tall as a person on Q's desk as punishment.

Video Games

• Hades: Several dozen spectral shades are shown living out their afterlife punishment toiling in Hades' Celestial Bureaucracy.

Web Comics

• Punderworld: After Theseus and Pirithous attempt to kidnap Persephone she recommends dumping them in Tartarus, however Hades reminds her that there are procedures to follow, and has them fill out a mountain of paperwork instead.
  Hades: If you want to avoid Tartarus and instead get back to your mortal life outside you will have to fill these forms correctly. I have found about 30 typos specifically in the sections Alpha 437 to Delta 304. Your name was signed incorrectly twice, oh and... did I mention this? Ancient Greek 2.0 is no longer a valid language in this domain. You will have to take a course to learn the version 3, as there are quite a few terms that changed.
  Persephone: Wow... some punishments truly are worse than Tartarus.
  Hades: Thank you, dear. I do my best.

Western Animation

• Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers: In the episode "Throw Mummy from the Train", Dr. Crockery's assistant Wexler hates, above everything, having to catalogue, write down and label the Doctor's antiques collection, so in order to become a noted archaeologist in his own right (and become stinking rich), he revives the Sphinx. When the police arrest him, Wexler is in utter despair when Dr. Crockery makes it clear that Wexler will continue doing the Doctor's cataloguing even in jail.
• Monsters at Work: "The Big Wazowskis": Mike and Gary, who are competing in the company bowling competition, make a bet that the loser has to do the winner's paperwork for a month.
• The Simpsons: An unintentional example in "Bart the Murderer." After Bart Simpson accidentally leaves his permission slip to go on a field trip at home, he has to stay at school while everyone else goes on the trip. Instead, Principal Skinner has him lick envelopes all day. Skinner does not see this as a punishment, though Bart, looking quite miserable, seems to disagree.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: Captain Freeman promotes Mariner rather than sending her to the brig for one of her many bouts of insubordination. She gets treated to seminars, meetings, management training, performing a ship-wide systems audit, and then auditing the audit.
• Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?: After a car chase has caused a considerable amount of property damage, Zach and Ivy are forced to fill out the corresponding paperwork for all the claims against ACME.

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