Monday, March 28, 2005
Work Essay One: Binding Agent
For reasons of pure coincidence, I happen to have lined up five essays having something to do with the physical nature of the place where I work. Easter Sunday was a day of wonderfully sensual experiences, as was saturday when Dave had his blowout party and indeed the whole damn weekend thank you very much. I may get around to saying something about some of that later on. Right now, it seems like I’m supposed to be writing about the workspace, so that’s what I’m going to do for the next five-count’em-five posts. Plus, for no extra charge, each day I’ll throw in the inadvertently amusing name of a business in Richmond or Albany, two cities in the east bay.
Without further ado, here’s post number one:
It’s my way to blame myself. Each failed penetration, each ruined sheet and disassociated set, made me question my own competence, my very identity as a man. Other people could snap one right off cleanly through a healthy stack without thinking twice. I had to resort to multiples, back-and-front action, and even that dreaded fallback, clips. It couldn’t have been that I’d gotten the only stapler in the building that didn’t work - I was screwing it up somehow. I was pressing too hard and too fast, or not forcefully enough when it really counted. Whatever was wrong, it was within my power to fix it. I sought the answer within myself.
Then, recently, my supervisor sat at my desk for a little business chat and handed me some documents to staple together for her. “I don’t know,” I admitted in sorrow and shame, “if I’ll be able to do all of these.” “Of course you can,” she reassured me. “I’ll show you.”
Four or five ruined staples later, pages 7ff still hadn’t been pierced by my delicate silver spikes, which, rather, formed the beginning of a carpet of mashed steel wires covering the corner of the small sheaf. “This is ridiculous,” she muttered as she grabbed another Swingline off a neighboring desk and neatly nailed one right through the whole stack. At that moment I began to doubt my own personal responsibility for my maniford stapling woes.
It felt self-indulgent, even unto a perversity, to credit the possibility that some entirely outside element, randomly connected to me by the heedless cosmos, was the cause of three years and more of botched sheafs, cascading pages and a continually reinforced sense of ineffectuality The possibility held the sweet promise of self-actualization, but my world had not yet changed enough for me to rely on what was still really a mere hypothesis. A theory was all well and good, but I needed hard physical proof.
Two days later, real proof was delivered. My supervisor stopped by that morning with a cruel new tool, matte black and knurled, poised like a snake with replaceable fangs. “This is for you,” she announced as she handed it over. Immediately it felt different in the palm of my hand - light, agile and capable, instead of heavy, plodding and reeking with the stench of failure. I kept the old stapler in reserve in case the new one somehow failed in the clutch more spectacularly even than the old one typically did, but I considered it unlikely I’d need it. I expected to be able to make the big switch very soon, and on a permanent basis.
For the better part of a week I didn’t need to staple a thing, not even once. But when my chance eventually, inevitably, came to test out the spikemaster 3000 in the crucible of necessity, it came through with profound proficiency. Each time I gripped it, it seemed to find a good place to clamp down on my papers, forming pleasing angles with healthy margins for a confident, reliable bite. More importantly, when I closed my fist around it - on two pages, on five, or even ten or more - it obeyed me. It secured them. It pumped wire brads cleanly through each and every sheet, locking their trailing edges into a tidy pair of folded arms that quietly waited for a reader to depend on their gleaming steel strength. The sound it made was a crisp machined click as the staple was driven into place, and a snap as the ends were efficiently bent back over themselves. The first few, I was willing to treat as flukes - but once I successfully drove a staple through a dozen sheets in one one try, almost doubling my previous record with the old shoddy stapler, I had to sit back and laugh in imperial triumph. I threw away the old stapler with derision and ensconced the new stapler in a place of honor at my elbow. My days of perforating my paperwork were over. My days as a stapledriving man have just begun. I am the John Henry of paperwork cohesion. I am staple-ready and proud to punch.
Bring it on.
Random Business Name from Richmond or Albany, CA: Handloggers. (bonus fact: kel hears from people at work that it’s a great place to get wood.)
