Today’s entry concerns office supplies, and I had really hoped to find away to start it off other than a Seinfeldian query along the lines of “What is the deal with office supplies?” But…what is the deal with office supplies? For real. I’ve never bought into conspiracy theories much, and I know I have an unfortunate tendency to anthropomorphize everything from socks to computer parts to food, but I have to say, based on the evidence I’ve collected, I think some sort of sociological phenomenon is at work here — namely, a sort of Lord of the Flies meets Gaslight plot by the occupants of my desk to drive me completely around the bend and out of sight.

Now, the drawer in which I keep my office supplies is not what anyone would call ruthlessly well-organized, so perhaps I have only myself to blame. Until yesterday afternoon, when I decided to whip the drawer into shape once and for all instead of continuing with the compost-heap plan, all of my pens and paper clips and whatnot lived in a haphazard pit of pointiness, which may account for certain psychological disorders from which the rubber bands seem to suffer. So I guess I can’t hold the AA batteries responsible for that pesky game of hide-and-seek they insist on playing, disguising themselves as erasers when my Walkman is dying and then acting like a six-year-old in the presence of his father’s camcorder when all I want is a Post-It note. “Look at me! Look at me, over here! Look! See? I’m tangled up in the Scotch tape! Over here! Look!”

And I guess, if I spent my life in a dark drawer, cheek by jowl with a handful of red Bic Stics — and the red Bic Stic is the rabbit of the office-supply world; leave two of them alone in a drawer, turn on the Barry White, and by the next day you can outfit an entire squadron of AP graders — I’d probably act out the same way the little compressed-air straw does. The little compressed-air straw wants its freedom, you see, and in order to slip the surly bonds of desk and touch the face of somewhere else, it does whatever it has to do. It flies off of the can. It wriggles free of Scotch tape. It slithers down behind the drawer, and when I reach for it while speaking in soothing tones, it jabs me in the cuticle. Nor does it appreciate my calling it “Moriarty.”

I have also seen data to suggest that many office supplies suffer from depression. My Cross pen sets, for example. The average Cross pen set has dangerously low self-esteem, because it knows that it is kind of a lame gift and that it is the rare recent graduate indeed who will actually find use for a mechanical pencil. It is shiny and comes with a leather case, and yet it languishes unused, hating itself, and when its big moment finally arrives — when I decide that, as a grown woman, the time has come to wean myself from pens with heads on them — it won’t write at all. Its ink has dried up. It has lost the ability to love.

Other pens deal with their depression via passive-aggressive behavior. The fountain pen is a perfect example. It pretends that the cartridges I bought will fit, and then they don’t. I exchange the cartridges for the correct size, and then the fountain pen refuses to let me unscrew it. Then the cartridge breaks and stains my shirt, I get upset, the fountain pen starts crying…it’s just not a constructive way to deal with problems, and yet I try to work it out with the fountain pen periodically, because I bought the damn thing, and I bought the cartridges (…twice), and I bought the clever little chamois blotting rag, and dammit, a fountain pen is sophisticated, right? Well, sophisticated, yes. Mature? In touch with its anger in a positive way? No.

But these issues pale in comparison to the crowd psychology I see at work in the writing implement population. I like a particular kind of pen; I can write with others if I need to, but my preferred pen is a Bic medium-point ballpoint, blue or black ink, and I buy them by the box. But I also have a compulsion to take free pens wherever I might find them, as well as a weird Catholic guilt about not chucking pens I don’t like until they run out of ink. I know it’s irrational; it’s a pen, for God’s sake. But I can’t throw pens away. So the preferred pens and the acquired pens all mix together in the drawer, and over time, a strange and distinctly Mafia-war-esque trend becomes apparent. The preferred pens begin to just…disappear. I don’t know where they go. I don’t know what becomes of their remains. I do know that I buy twenty blue Bics, I dump them in the drawer with the rest of the pens, and a week later, I only have three left, and the uncomfortable sensation that the fine-point pen I stole from the Aladdin is smiling smugly at me. The cats enjoy batting pens under the couch and out of reach, it’s true, but…all of them? Because I’ve looked, and they don’t all wind up under there.

The Sharpies engage in a slightly less malign form of pranksterism. Inevitably, I have to try every single Sharpie in the drawer before I find one that works. Fine. But I can’t just throw the others out, because the one that worked the last time won’t work the next time. I can tell myself to remember the blue one, but it won’t help. The next time, the blue one will sputter and scratch on the envelope, and I’ll have to dig all the way down through the fossil record of the drawer until I’ve exhausted every Sharpie but one.

I wouldn’t mind that so much — after all, I always do find that one that works — but the Sharpie has passed its philosophy along to the inkpad. Take my advice, gentle reader, I pray you, and do not buy an inkpad and a series of witty stamps with which to use it. That way, madness lies. First of all, when the inkpad assures you that its top will stay on, the inkpad is lying like a cheap rug. Second of all, the inkpad only works when you reach into the drawer for something else, brush your fingers across it, and then unwittingly touch your face a bunch of times for that “extra in Oliver Twist” look. When you actually want to make a stamp out of ink as nature allegedly intended, the inkpad will have gone dry as a ghost town, complete with a very tiny tumbleweed of pencil shavings blowing forlornly across its western edge. It is not a breed of aggravation you need, believe me.

Well, yesterday I’d had enough. No more playing warden to my desk drawer’s prison. I cleaned the drawer out, I made little dividers, and I brought myself to part with a few pens. I sincerely hope that, by showing my office supplies respect, I will earn respect from them in turn. But I still didn’t know quite what to do with the blue-moon office supplies.

You know the ones I mean; we all have pounds and pounds of them weighing down our desks and drawers. We want desperately to throw them away, but we might need them someday, and when we do, we’ll have to go out and buy them all over again. Elmer’s Glue, for one. If I throw it out, I will obviously have to make a pilgrim’s hat out of construction paper the very next day. Ditto the hole punch. I haven’t punched a hole since high school. The hole punch has rust on it. (And I tremble to think of how that happened, I don’t mind telling you. Does it rain in that drawer now?) If I chuck it, I will need a hole punched moments later, and I will have to use a barbecue fork. I really can’t think of any reason I would need sidewalk chalk, ever, but hey, you never know. What if I have to hopscotch to the death and I don’t have the tools? So I got the blue-moon supplies their own box. The glue stick, the double-sided tape, the eraser shaped like a pig all live happily together now.

Now if I can just untangle whatever X-rated mess the paper clips have gotten themselves into and sit the pencils down for a little chat about inappropriate aggression, I think I’ll have the situation under control. And by the way, no, the gangrene I got from that pushpin is not affecting my perceptions, but thanks for asking.

July 14, 2003

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