Staplers

The other day I needed to staple a couple of pieces of paper together, so I headed to my junk drawer. I’m a highly organized person for the most part, but I do have that one junk drawer where I keep such things. I believe that even the neatest and tidiest among us has one – a junk drawer, that is. It’s just a necessity. We all need at least one place to throw stuff willy-nilly and move on to more important things.

So I opened my junk drawer and started rummaging around until I was finally able to lay my hands on the stapler. I grabbed the papers, pushed down, and - brace yourself because this may come as a shock - it didn’t work. That was sarcasm in case you couldn’t tell. I can’t say that I was surprised. Has there ever been a gadget in all of history that fails more often than a stapler? I doubt it. I can’t begin to tell you how many I went through when I used to have an actual office. They were always breaking or jamming up, forcing me to run around the building trying to find one that was functional. Once I succeeded in locating a working stapler, my attempts to borrow it were inevitably met with a look that can only be interpreted as, “Are you out of your mind?“

I pretty much had to offer up a hefty security deposit to get anyone to hand over a working stapler. One girl reluctantly agreed to loan me hers, but first took out a bottle of fingernail polish and wrote her name on it in large letters. I couldn’t really blame her. Then from the minute I had the borrowed stapler in my hand until the time it was returned, I lived in fear that it would break while it was in my custody. We had all kinds of expensive equipment in that building that broke down from time to time, but none so often as the staplers.

I guess it goes without saying that I couldn’t get my junk drawer stapler to work. I rummaged around some more for a paper clip and tossed the stapler in the trash. I may buy a new one. I’m not sure. I just haven’t decided if it’s worth the aggravation that is sure to follow.