The Great Pen Debacle.
Subtitled: Staying out of the stores on Black Friday or
Do I have too much time on my hands?
Cleaning out dresser drawers the other day I swept up what must be a
dozen or so of nice hefty pens, you know, the corporate or
institutional giveaways or gifts from relatives, those probably
regifted but very nice nonetheless. Many had great artwork, one even
from the Alutiiq Museum on Kodiak Island, Alaska where a niece once
worked. -Native art etched in gold fill on that one.
Most of these "collector grade" pens had gone dry, some refusing to
write more than skips and streaks. So I put a bunch, points down, in
a glass with a quarter inch of water and left them overnight.
Instant success? Only a few came back to life. Scrolled, rolled,
redipped in alcohol all of them endlessly onto fresh paper in attempt
to get most to work. I even remembered old admonishments in ball point
times past to use them in cursive only. "Engineer" block printing and
straight line art work were deemed strict no-no's and all but
guaranteed to lock up a point.
There I was duplicating all the ovals and Scripts of Zaner-Bloser
writing skills I learned in grade school to produce decent writing.
"Use your whole arm, not just scrunched up hand, Wilson."
All this produced three decent pens of the more expensive variety.
An obvious thought was to take the good fillers from lesser pens and
put them into the keepers. And do you know that not one, not one
filler was compatible with the bodies of the desired? (Keep your mind
focused here please.)
The railroad gauge debacle of European roads before World War I was
nothing compared to this. Even the better constructed and apparently
similar larger bodied of the more expensive pens did not fit into each
other. I learned of many systems of point advancement, ratchet, simple
friction, spring loaded, you name it, but not one fit another.
Obvious isn't it. "Please buy another.
We do not encourage recycling."
Well.
For that, The "NY Times" has lost another customer. I simply refuse
to do their cross-words in anything less than ink-only with a customer
grade gimmie.
I'm going back to a world where pins 2 and 7 are normally filaments for most octals, with filament voltage indicated by tube nomenclature.
So there.
