Office Supplies

2.25.2010

I’m an office supply junkie. I could literally spend hours in any office supply store, even if I don’t buy anything. I am still upset about a certain pen that was discontinued 9 years ago, and I can’t find it anywhere, even though I only owned like 3. They weren’t those $30 pens either. You could buy a dozen for 15 bucks or so. That was about the time the Pilot G-2 07 pens came out, and I’ve used them almost exclusively for nearly a decade. I’ve got one in my pocket right now. Anytime I see someone using one, I always make comment, and somehow they don’t find me completely insane, so maybe there’s hope, or at least some other freaks like me.

I used to use pencils all the time, but using your typical wooden pencil got tiring because they lose that ultra-sharp tip within the first ten seconds of writing, then as your line becomes wider and less-defined, you find yourself longing to regain that crisp, dark line you started with. The problem is you have to weigh how bad you want that freshly sharpened pencil tip against how comfortable you are in your chair and how far it is to the sharpener.

Enter the mechanical pencil. Now, you have that perfectly sharp, always perfect line without ever having to leave your seat. The interruption is momentary when all you have to do is click the forward-advancing mechanism to regain your sharp tip. Unless, of course, you’re using 0.5 lead, which breaks, on average, every seventeenth letter, at least it does for me.

The problem is, though, there’s no character in a mechanical pencil. Sure there are different brands. Sure, there are different styles. Sure, traditional pencils and mechanical pencils are mass-produced in much the same way, but there’s something different about a wooden pencil that feels right. So, it may take more time and effort to keep it in working shape the way you want it, but so does a good home cooked meal versus a peel-and-zap frozen dinner or a lasting relationship, and those are always worth the effort.

1 comments:

Knox McCoy said...

I'm a crayon man myself. Sturdy, color variety, and professional.

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