Day 7

Day 7

Why do pens run out so quickly?

This seems like a very pointless topic, and I think it would be if we were on about pencils. My point would be blunt and faded and become irrelevant, so I'd need to sharpen it. Of course, when you sharpen a pencil, you shave off the wooden casing that your graphite was encased in, making it usable. Fun fact, pencils do not contain lead. Lead is poisonous. Perhaps it was a lie our teachers thought up to stop us from chewing the ends of our pencils at school, and it just stuck. It certainly stopped me, but not my peers, if I re-call the communal pencil tray correctly.

Sorry what was I talking about? PENS not pencils, don't know where that came from, it's quite late. Anyway, I bought quite a nice pen from Rymans (a UK stationary store) not so long ago. They were £1 each at the check-out, and they had really nice designs and letters on them, with lids that look like sharks and unicorns and everything (made by Legami). Unfortunately, I started using it yesterday, only for a couple of pages. And it ran out,

"No!", I literally exclaimed at my pen. "You can't have run out already. You can't have. 2 pages!".  The shark lid frowned back at me, suitably ashamed of itself. In fairness to Legami, these were on display at the front of the store, so they may have been sampled and used by other customers, and my other pens from the same brand have been lasted way longer, maybe I just got unlucky. However, it's a similar story with my current pen that I've really enjoyed writing with recently, my Paper Mate gel pen F. This is has a transparent shaft, so I can gradually see the amount of ink (gel, ink, writing goo? Not sure) left. I've used it for about 4 full a5 pages, but it's already a fair way from where it started. 

I always remember pens lasting longer than this. You could buy a pack of cheap biros from ASDA, and you could get through the notebook before you got through the pen (although I was buying cheaper, thinner notebooks). These pens are much nicer, and I prefer writing with them, don't get me wrong, but why do they comparatively live such short lives? Are they putting down more ink? The ones with thicker tips should (that Legami was a 0.7 mm, quite a chunky thing for standard writing), but these biros were no slouches on the thickness either, I'd guess around 0.3 to 0.5. 

Is it just me that cares enough about this to write about it? Almost certainly.  However, I certainly seem to spend more on stationary than I used to before, despite being more digital than ever before. It might be speeches like this that require me to replace my pens so quickly...

In summary, Word doesn't run out of ink, use that for big things. Unless your printing it of course, then the printer can run out of ink.. OK I JUST NEED TO STOP NOW SEE YOU TOMORROW.

(Note to self, don't write these as the last thing you do in the day :)