January12

Red Swingline

The other day at work, I was preparing for a meeting and needed to collate some print outs. I headed into the production room to sort the pages and then staple them together. I reach over and grab the stapler and then “tried” to staple the stack together. As I suspected would happen, the staple doubled over on itself and died. I grumbled, grabbed the staple remover (which should really be called an “f’ed up staple remover”), removed the stapler and then proceeded to look for another stapler.

I was happily surprised to see another one right next to me. And another one. And another one. And, well, when I was done counting, there were nine (9) staplers in the production room. They were all the same model as the crappy plastic stapler that messed up the first time I tried it. All of them the same, except one – a nicer, solider, metal stapler.

I didn’t even bother messing with the other ones, I went right for the metal goodness and finished the job of assembling my pages. It gave me the nice “ka-chunk,” that a good stapler does.

It was that last statement that made me wonder, why does there need to be such a thing as a good stapler and a bad stapler? All I need is something that will consistently staple papers together.

Take a look at Swingline’s stapler section – it lists 74 different staplers for sale. 74!?! That’s outrageous. In my opinion, there really only needs to be four staplers:

  1. Regular everyday stapler
  2. High capacity stapler
  3. Electric stapler
  4. Mini-stapler

But back to the point, why bother buying a case of crappy plastic staplers when you can buy nicer metal ones that won’t break. It was obvious that the eight staplers left in the production room all lost out to the metal one, so why not toss them? These things aren’t light bulbs, it’s not convenient to use them until they die and then get a new one.

Ah well, until they invent the perfect stapler, you can hear what staplers should sound like at VirtualStapler.com.

+ original post date: January 12, 2007 08:16 PM
+ categories: WTF, Work

comments4

(comments rss feed)

Whoah, your new design just totally freaked me out!

+ author: ScooterJ
+ posted: January 16, 2007 01:01 PM

Wow! This looks AWESOME.

+ author: bev
+ posted: January 17, 2007 09:41 AM

nice. that's the stapler from office space.

+ author: Lacy
+ posted: January 17, 2007 07:02 PM

Why so many cheap staplers? Because people steal staplers more than they steal looks at a good looking girl/guy. The nice metal teacher-style staplers are expensive to replace.

Until some caped crusader takes up hunting down stapler stealers and making them pay for their crimes, we will be stuck with crappy plastic pieces of poo.

+ author: John DeCesaro
+ posted: January 23, 2007 02:44 PM

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