By the end of the week at work, I generally end up with more paperclips than I had at the start of the week. More paperclips come to me attached to documents than I send out of my office. As a result, I’m a net paperclip importer. I never have to go searching for paperclips in the supply cupboard.
How about you?
[sub]okay, it’s a really stupid topic, but if I talked about what was the most interesting thing that really happened at work lately, it’d be kind of creepy, and only lead to questions I can’t answer.[/sub]
I get materials that don’t need to be bound in any way that are paper clipped and often, worse, stapled. I am forever getting paper clips I do not want. I’ve got a bowl of them that I will never ever use and I don’t know what to do with them. Can they be recycled?
You are obviously unaware of the role the paperclip plays in the life cycle of the hanger.
Paperclips are the larval forms. Safety pins are the eggs. Since the eggs hatch quickly, you can’t a safety pin when you need one, but there are always tons of paperclips. The larval phase is quite long and conditions have to be perfect for them to metamorph back to the adult wire hanger.
So, next time you look into the closet and see the tangle of mating hangers, remember, soon you’ll hear that patter of little paperclips.
*I’m the “other”
It’s absurd how many paperclips I accumulate at work. There’s a gal at work who separates out checks and approvals between the two of us, and she likes to give me checks paperclipped to nothing; just a single check with a paperclip on it. I’ve tried giving them away with some of my paperwork, but they come back
I don’t want anymore! Please, please stop giving me paperclips!
However, there is a paperclip holder in the conference room, and I tend to amuse myself during long conference calls by making chains and bending them into wire sculptures.
My accountant sends me paperclips and I end up sending most of them back. The ones that don’t get sent back end up being used as “tools” or toys. I pretty much break even.
Importer. When we have meetings, and everyone brings paperwork, I’m given the paperwork to shred later. So I get all the paper clips. I haven’t had to buy paper clips in, oh, five years.
I’m another “Sweden” - my office doesn’t operate on the movement of paper. Yes, we’re pretty close to that Utopian paperless office.
We don’t receive paper and we don’t send paper out. I probably don’t hit “print” more than three times a month, and there’s rumors of a copier existing down the hall.
Heck, we hardly even staple things - in ten years, I think I might have used one and a half strips of staples.
However… the previous occupant of this cube was a clip hoarder. I have a drawer filled with various implements for holding paper together. Three boxes of Trombones Geants, the pencil tray is filled with both sizes of clips plus a bonus clump of dried-out rubber bands, and there’s several handfuls of the big bat-wing binder clips. Plus, two boxes of staples, which at my historical rate of consumption, will probably rust away to dust before I have a chance to use half of them.
I’m tempted to pour clips into inter-office envelopes and send them off to random buildings with no return address. Just to get rid of them and hopefully get them to a good home. I know they’re cheap, but it seems terrible to just throw away perfectly good clips, so they languish in the dark.
