The Natural Death

I was thinking about office supplies. It's common to project human mortality onto certain inanimate objects, which we call "perishable". I have had to do inventory before, and apart from making me wish that I was dead, it also had me characterizing in my mind certain segments of our supplies as alive or dead. It was things like pens that we would go through a lot of, and it seems natural to me that one would try to ascertain why, as one would ask why a loved one should die in an untimely fashion.

I find that it's exceptionally rare that a pen dies a natural death. I will lose fifty pens before one that ever wrote to begin with suddenly fails to write. I wish that I could figure just how much of a pen I use up on average before it becomes someone else's pen, or before it becomes garbage. With a pencil, you only need a measuring tape to figure it, and that's one reason I like pencils. It's always gratifying to think that an implement lived a long, full life before being cut down.

It's not just the pen or the pencil this happens to. I favor legal pads and sometimes the little pad of paper, and it's nearly as uncommon for every page to get exhausted before I forget them somewhere. The pen or pencil I may stick in my pocket or over my ear, and it's easier to hang on to them. The legal pad is sometimes the only thing I have on me, and it's terribly easy for me to forget it at some destination, if not while I'm traveling. I'm alert to the risk of losing things while traveling, but when I've gotten to where I'm going that lets up.

If I could just hang on to both pen and paper, I feel as if I could be more efficient. This would be true not just because I would need to buy them less often, but because the same attitude would serve me well when applied to other things. In all areas I would achieve more and use less, and heaven knows that I'm not so blessed with either resources or material reward that I can afford to squander them or leave them on the table, as the expression goes. Here's hoping that I improve in the future, but that you don't get much better. I would have to buy even less if I could continue to count on finding pens.