At my first office job (I was 19), I stapled my thumb. It was my first day, I was stapling stuff, and I ran out of staples. I figured out how to open the stapler and put the new staples in. For some reason, though, I was unable to close the stapler again. For about five minutes I struggled with it. Finally, I moved my thumb underneath and squeezed as hard as I could. The stapler closed and drove a staple directly into my thumb. It was so deep that when I looked at my thumbnail I could see a silver dot where the staple was touching it from the inside.
It did not hurt at all, but I foresaw some difficulty continuing with the task at hand, so I tried to pull the staple out. That’s when it started to hurt. A lot. On the verge of asking my Supervisor for help, I suddenly realized that going to her and saying “Duhhhhh, I stapled my thumb. What should I do now?” would not be the best way to make an impression my first day on the job. I eventually extracted it with the help of some cold running water and a lot of patient tugging.
I know now that I did it wrong, but my question is this:
What is the acceptable method of stapling your thumb?
If you staple your cat to the floor, you will be able to avoid the scorn and derision you rightfully receive for hanging your toilet paper the wrong way. Plus it won’t be able to hide when it’s time to go to the vet.
Unless specifically requested to, never staple or fold a résumé that’s intended for a prospective employer. It’s unprofessional and can make more work for the person who has to process it. Many companies scan or copy them.
If you’re mailing it, send it in a 9 x 13 inch envelope.
Not so sure. Standardly folded (into thirds) buisness letter style is just as professional if not more so. Though stapling is not good, paper clipping the resume together is fine by me.
Well, these were to hand out to the people interviewing me. It gives them something to take notes on. It is not easy to pass out non-stapled packets. I mail my resumes without staples in evelopes large enough to not fold them.
Argh, it makes my skin crawl just thinking about crooked stacks of stapled paper! Unfortunately for me, my otherwise brilliant boss seems to be constitutionally incapable of proper stapling technique.
I swear, sometimes I wonder if she fans out a document’s pages like a goddamn poker hand before crookedly and half-assedly stapling it so that one side of the staple almost penetrates the stack, while the other side of the staple crumples uselessly on top of the first page like a dead spider’s curled-up leg, and the last page of the document is one breath away from floating off the back.
I routinely unstaple, align, and restaple these abominations when they pass through my hands, but it’s not easy because after she “staples” the document, she manhandles it so heavily that all of the individual page corners get creased together in the crooked-stack pattern and it’s almost impossible to get them realigned correctly.
Don’t tell anyone because this makes me feel completely insane, but sometimes the document is in such bad shape that I print out a brand-new copy, staple it neatly, and then reproduce her copious highlighting and move her Post-It notes to the crispy new version.
Apropos of absolutely nothing - it occurs to me now that I’ve never mentioned to you that I always think of Cabbage Patch Dolls when I see your name.
At any rate, the appropriate way to staple your thumb is to do so with a staple guy, through the knuckle, into the tendon or muscle. That is the only way that you can truly appreciate the horror of what you’ve just done.
How do you people get any work done? I go through hundreds of packets of stapled paper & folded drawings a day, and I have never had the urge to redo someone else’s work because the feng shui was out of whack. Hell, if I have a stack of paper that’s too big for my BFS (Big F’n Stapler: 3/4" will staple about 125 pages together with ease) I’ll just throw a rubber band or two on it and send it out. Half of you would pass out after looking at the mounds of crooked pages, randomly bound by rubber bands, paper clips, and staples. Sometimes there will be all three together, on one packet!!
I think I would pass out. Good lord man, you truly are madd! What are you thinking? How can you send that kind of work out for other people to see? I bet your desk looks like my boss’s desk…papers everywhere higgly piggly.
Oh man. Here’s a pet peeve of mine. We staple our client records in the upper right hand corner and here’s what I usually see.
Staples about an inch down and an inch over from the upper right so that they staple goes through the client’s name and address.
*This is usually made even worse when someone has to take apart a record for some reason (i.e. to fax it) and they rip it apart, instead of using the staple remover making a mess of the name and address.
3 to 5 staples somewhere in the vicinity of the upper right hand corner. I don’t know why there are so many, sometimes they forgot to include a sheet, sometimes the first staple didn’t go all the way through so they thought another 2 to 4 staples should hold it and sometimes I think they do it just to annoy me.
Oh and sometimes they hide the numerous staples they pur a few staples in the bottom sheets then they put on the top sheet and put just one staple through it so it looks neat, until you look at the back.
The complete opposite of number 2, I have seen records with no staples at all and no staple hestitation marks either. I have seen others that the staple didn’t go all the way through, yet it was expected to hold several pages together.
Pages all wonky and stapled together, sometimes in one of the methods above. Straighten them and tap them on the desk fercryingoutloud!, it takes 2 seconds!
Stapling some little scrap of paper or a business card on the front covering the name and address so we can’t see where to file it without moving the little piece of paper.
*Just as bad is stapling some little piece of paper or business card to the back because these get bent and torn when you try to file the records.
Stapling a record, then realizing you need to take it apart again and ripping it apart instead of using the staple removed and tearing part of the paper and then stapling it back together with this little tag of paper dangling.
Oh, and probably my biggest peeve isn’t actually where they staple it’s when the stapler runs out - they go and get another stapler instead of putting in new staples! I have come in to find three staplers in the same spot and two are empty. Grrrrr … they use the excuse of not knowing where the extra staples are (they’ve been in the same place for at least 3 years) so I put about 3 signs on the cabinet that say “STAPLES” in huge type. They still don’t refill the staplers.
:mad: