Paperworkaholic

When you need forms filled out in triplicate and filed in a very particular way, the Paperworkaholic is your man. Not only because he's especially adept at crossing t's and dotting i's, but also because he genuinely enjoys doing so.

A paperworkaholic is never happier than when sitting before a stack of files and folders that need to be taken care of and is your greatest ally when face to face with a Vast Bureaucracy.

The Paperworkaholic can crossover into many bureaucrat tropes. See Badass Bureaucrat for times when their skills are put to impressive use. They might be an Obstructive Bureaucrat depending on just how seriously or literally they take their position. Being a Paperworkaholic may not necessarily prevent someone from being a Corrupt Bureaucrat. The opportunities for such may even be part of what they like about the bureaucracy.

Their love of the job usually means that they will not be a Beleaguered Bureaucrat unless they happen to be having a particularly bad day. Most Desk Jockeys would prefer to be back in the action, though a few may come to prefer their position behind a desk. The Paperworkaholic is most likely a Clerk as well.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Not paperwork, per se, as Technology Marches On, but Belldandy from Ah! My Goddess legitimately enjoys working at Heaven's Celestial Bureaucracy, as opposed to Urd and Skuld, who see it as a chore.

Comic Books

• Peter P. Peterson, Soulsearchers and Company's accountant, is an absolute whiz with paperwork, and, at times, it seems this is the only thing keeping the company afloat.
• Ultra Magnus, from The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, enjoys nothing more than ensuring every schedule, complaint, work order, and other assorted paperwork is properly sorted and filed away. His idea of an Autobot initiation is a glorified user agreement license.

Fanfiction

• Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is already organized to a borderline-neurotic degree. So it isn't much of an exaggeration when fan works depict her really enjoying her paperwork.
  • In the final chapter of Hard Reset (Eakin), Twilight Sparkle is having a rough time recovering after escaping a long series of Groundhog Day Loops. Princess Celestia puts Twilight in front of a stack of paperwork roughly twice as tall as she is to cheer her up.
    Twilight's Narration: I love her so much sometimes, I don't even know how to properly express it.
  • In Bureaucracy Is Magic, Twilight takes over as Ponyville's mayor and breezes through the backlog of paperwork that the last few mayors left for her, with a smile on her face. But even she has her limits: upon realizing just how inefficient some processes were, Twilight tried to streamline the entire bureaucracy, then freaks out when she finds the system is beyond her ability to organize.
  • In Beauty Will Tear Us Apart, Twilight is jealous of the top-secret classes that Ditzy Doo gets to attend. Ditzy tries to console her by mentioning how many of the courses involve boring paperwork, but that just makes Twilight even more jealous.

Films — Live-Action

• In Secretary, Lee applies for a job as E. Edward Grey's secretary. At her job interview, Grey explains that the job consists of typewriting, filing, etc., and warns her that "it's very dull work". Lee replies "I like dull work".

Literature

• Discworld:
  • Rufus Drumknott, clerk and secretary of Lord Vetinari, takes great pride and joy in his work. In fact, he is so insulted when Vetinari suggests in an offhand comment that he's been less than honest with office supplies that Vetinari feels compelled to apologize.
  • Subverted with A.E. Pessimal. He certainly seems the type, being very fastidious and extremely able with an account book, and Sam Vimes writes him off as such at first. However, the only reason he became a clerk is that he was always too small and weak to be what he really wanted: a watchman. After unwittingly giving Pessimal a chance to live the dream, Vimes realizes this. He also realizes that the Watch needs people with Pessimal's skillset, and hires him into the Watch as his adjutant, where he becomes a Badass Bureaucrat whose audits are feared by Ankh Morpork's business community.
• Samuel Peabody, the White Council secretary in The Dresden Files, is not much of a wizard but loves his paperwork, which is why other Council members dump all the bureaucratic tasks on him. Harry mostly perceives him as an Obstructive Bureaucrat, however. In Turn Coat, Peabody is revealed to be The Mole in the Council, who used the signatures that various wizards left on his papers to Mind Control them. Harry, who never signed anything out of dislike for Peabody, thus became the only member left to oppose him.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy: The Vogons are an entire race of this trope. They're basically the galaxy's grunt workers, doing all the menial, bureaucratic tasks that everyone else can't be bothered with.
  Ford Prefect: They can't think; they can't imagine; most of them can't even spell. They just... run things.
• The Secret of Santa Vittoria: Captain Von Prem is a meticulous keeper of records, and copies all of his personal correspondence (being forced to leave a lot of it behind when he leaves town).

Live-Action TV

• Mr. Crispin Horsefry in the Sky adaptation of Going Postal. In the book, he's just a somewhat dense lackey to the main villain. In contrast, in the TV film, he's obsessed with balancing numbers, to the point that he keeps detailed notes of his company's illegal deals. When the villain finds out about this, he's so incensed he kills him and tries to burn the records. Nevertheless, the books are rescued and used to oust the corrupt board members.
• In The Tick (2016), Arthur is treated like this. To the point of nearly getting a date with a girl based on their mutual love for paperwork.
• Parks and Recreation: The series' resident Butt-Monkey Garry "Jerry" Gergich loves the tedium of looking through and organizing paperwork. He can pack up and lick envelopes for mailing out for hours on end, is quite astute at finding small and seemingly unnoticed things in the fine print, and is a member of a big notary stamp club.

Print Media

• In Game Informer magazine's "Game Infarcer" April Fools prank, they had a parody reviewer who listed, among his list of favorite games, "Microsoft Word" and "Paperwork." Listed among his dislikes? "Fun."

Video Games

• Love of Magic: Henry Archer, Emily's chamberlain, is known for his attention to detail and ability to do the hard work of running the kingdom.
  Emily: Because keeping a Castle humming requires an anal-retentive monomaniac with a passion for office politics.
• Rosalyn P. Marshall from the MySims series is always a sucker for paperwork, whether she’s a Mayor, a Principal, or a Government Agent.

Visual Novels

• In My Magical Divorce Bureau, the protagonist enjoys working in an office and mentions their love of paperwork (something which they seem to think is universal). In the morning, the protagonist greets their (empty) office aloud, wondering "what excitement you will have for me today".

Webcomics

• Sweetheart in Skin Horse. No matter how ridiculous or dangerous the situation, as soon as she realises it requires forms to be completed (in quadruplicate!) her tail starts wagging.

Web Original

• Sparks Nevada, The Thrilling Adventure Hour's Marshal on Mars, will frequently say without irony that the paperwork is his favorite part of the job. He avoids doing it right before a date only because he knows he'll just get sucked into it. During a period towards the end of the series when the Red Plains Rider is marshal, he scoffs when she complains about paperwork.

Western Animation

• Futurama: This is Hermes Conrad's primary character trait. Working for the Central Bureaucracy, he loves filling out paperwork. He even has a song about it:
  We didn't choose to be bureaucrats
  No, that's what Almighty Jah made us
  We'd treat people like swine and make them stand in line
  Even if nobody paid us
  They say the world looks down on the bureaucrats
  They say we're anal, compulsive, and weird
  But when push comes to shove you gotta do what you love
  Even if it's not a good idea!
• Hilda: Elves are a whole race of this, as their entire society is built on paperwork. Even to the point that they are invisible to anyone who has not filled out the proper paperwork first. In the season 1 episode "The Tide Mice", Alfur is thus Hilda and Frida's best chance at finding a way to reverse the tide mice spell Hilda used.
• Menlo from Recess spends all of his free time—even recess period—in the school office, filing and organizing to his heart's content. He genuinely enjoys the job, even inviting Miss Lemon, the school secretary, to his birthday party in one episode (and to her credit, she goes!). The episode "Principal for a Day" reveals that Menlo was originally a hellion who loved causing trouble; Miss Finster and Principal Prickly rigged the titular contest to mold him into a mini-bureaucrat instead.
• Parodied in an early episode of Rugrats. The main four were playing "work" and imagined a lot of fun activities that included "Paperwork", which was Phil and Lil shredding paper with a lawn mower. Chuckie even says that his dad Chaz "pushes paper" for a living, which they imagine to be running around pushing stacks of paper with brooms. Interestingly, later episodes would prove that Chaz actually is a bureaucrat of some kind, and furthermore that he genuinely enjoys the work.

---