Wednesday 13 April 2011

The sheer bliss of being normal


I got home last night to find that Mrs von Neustadt has bought a lovely new long-arm stapler to enable her - and me, if I'm good - to staple music together for Stringwise and other fine musical type thingies. This is good. I like staplers.

To my horror the stapler, perhaps because it's a cheapo own-brand Ryman job rather than one with a proper maker's name on, does not appear to have printed or stamped on it the type of staples it needs. I thought this was absolutely standard practice, and to not do it seems … foolish … at best.

Naturally Mrs von Neustadt, before I'd got my hands on the new stapler, had thrown away the box, and compounded her sin by filling the device with staples that she thought seemed to fit OK. Seemed to fit OK? Seemed to fit OK?? Reader, do you not now begin to see the searing pain at the very heart of my existence? (No? Oh well, never mind, have a cuppa.)
In all honesty but through gritted teeth I'm forced to pause and admit that, by the purest fluke and not (of course) because 98.3% of all staples in the Cosmos are the same, Mrs von Neustadt did just happen to have filled it with the right staples. Absolute coincidence, mind, and clearly it does not in any way affect the purity of my argument. Ahem no indeed.
Anyway, I did what any red-blooded officer of my regiment (yes, thank you Tamsin, the ladies and gentlemen do, I suspect, know full well exactly which regiment we mean here) would have done, and retrieved the box from the recycling. I then tore off the little corner of cardboard which records the stapler's preferred diet and concealed it about my person before rerecycling its parent-box. Well I mean you would, wouldn't you? (No? Gosh. We should talk.)

Travelling to work this morning I was delighted to find the said insignificant-looking, but information-rich, fragment in my pocket.

Naturally I have now transcribed all of this crucial staple data into a small but strangely effective information system which lives on my portable wireless telephonic device, and which, entirely gorgeously, synchronizes silently and without fuss with its online webitty-web-access version - so if the information is here, it's also there, and, y'know, over there too. This I like, a lot.

So now I have this vital and very interesting data safely stashed away for all eternity or at least until a large systems failure of some kind. Empires may fall and rise, new elements emerge, Earth's orbital wobble may subtly change but I will always be able to tell you which staples you'll need.

I can't tell you how happy and fulfilled this little information handling and storage excursion has made me feel. I'm just glad I'm so normal. It's great.

4 comments:

Josie said...

Your reference to "y'know, over there," reminds me of my occasional gripe that English has no proper word for "over there". The Kronprinceßin and I were discussing this the other day - we listed the various options available in other European languages, and I mused that the best we have is 'yonder', but no-one uses it. Perhaps it's time 'yonder' staged a comeback.

Strawberryyog said...

Yeah - yonder is good!

David said...

I have in my hand a stapler (a Rexel Gazelle, in fact, made in Britain and with a proper British patent, no. 1337756). On it there is a sticky label bearing the typewritten words "To be used with staples 56(26/6) or 16(24/6)." Guess who typed the label and stuck it on.

(Hints: Not me. Not you. Not Mum. I've owned the stapler longer than I've been sharing stationery products with Amaryllis.)

This stapler has always been filled with the correct staples.

Strawberryyog said...

@David ha! Yes, I think I have guessed. I must say that I am very very impressed, though if the manufacturer had stamped it into the steel, as they should, then it wouldn't even have needed this (undeniably excellent and proper) labelling initiative.