So goes the saying in every home, at least once. Or so says George Carlin.
But the question is: where do the Good Scissors go? What is it about scissors that makes them so highly prone to misplacement? Why is it that a pair of Good Scissors only lasts, it would seem, about eighteen months before going irretrievably missing? I’m not suggesting that Good Scissors, after being lost, aren’t often found again after a few years. But then they promptly get lost again.
And as a side issue, and one that made me think of this, is it actually the case that more and more packaged items require scissors to open properly? Is it my imagination, or is the perforated strip with the inviting legend “Just Pull Here” giving way increasingly to the plain printed line with a tiny picture of scissors, meaning that once again you have to go raid the sewing basket to feed the cats?
I think it must be that kids today don’t have the Fear of Death like we did. My mom kept her “good scissors” for years. As a matter of fact, I still have my grandmother’s pinking shears along with their original box!
Using the “good scissors” for cutting paper was a crime punishable by a slow death in my house.
Scissors are a tool that can be used in many different places around the house, and people have a tendency to leave tools wherever they use them. So scissors can be left all over the place.
ETA too late: I’ve solved the MIA scissors dilemma by buying multiple pairs of average scissors and leaving them all around the house. Now, occasionally a pair will come up missing, but with my system, you only have to go a few feet before you find another pair.
As far a scissors go, I find that the cheap Harbor Freight black plastic scissors (with the red dot at the hinge) work incredibly well. They are so cheap that I have five or six pairs scattered around the house, and they cut as well as Fiskars.
The good scissors are OK, I don’t worry about them so much. What really keeps me awake at night is wondering where all the evil scissors are, and what they’re planning.
Truthfully, the “good” scissors are in the box with the crochet yarn and the metal crochet hooks. These things are in the parent bedroom. No one over the age of 2 or under the age of 19 is permitted in the parent bedroom without specific permission or an emergency. (Nightmares qualify as emergencies in anyone under 8 or so.) The untouchable pinking shears are hidden in the same case as the sewing machine, and therefore safe. The good kitchen shears are in the butcher block. If I find someone using my kitchen shears to cut paper, they will be required to perform additional unpleasant chores until my wrath is vindicated. According to boy1 who is 14, who is the only one to defy this rule, as boy2 watched and learned, this takes WAY TOO LONG. Often involving additional chores per day for 2-3 weeks, even. “Yes, boy1, I did mean the outside garbage cans smell. CLEAN THEM, inside and out. Here is the Comet and a sponge. Next time leave my kitchen shears alone.” Paper-cutting scissors are in the junk drawer. Return them there when you finish using them.
Yep. And the good scissors were kept in the sewing kit by the sewing machine. The crappy scissors were kept in the kitchen drawer along with a box knife and twine. It was the drawer of otherwise homeless items that contained matches, keys, bread twist ties and tape.
I find myself buying the $2 blue scissors at Ikea whene3ver I’m there. Tney’re a good all-purpose pair of scissors for general use, including kitchen and polystyrene plastic package cutting, but nothing I would call as good as a pair of Fiskars.
My solution is to saturate the area with the desired item. By the Le Chȃtelier principle, good scissors must start being lost at a slower rate as the concentration of lost scissors increases.
The good sewing scissors were used to bend a paper clip or something and now have dents in their 40 dollar precision blade surfaces that cannot be sharpened out.
The good kitchen scissors were used to cut chicken wire by my husband. He denies it but I came home one day and he was cutting chicken wire and the scissors were by him. They now have a dent similar to the sewing scissors.
The good multipurpose garage scissors were left on the ground by my husband after I took the kitchen scissors away from him and the dog chewed the plastic handles until they can no longer be used without shredding skin.
We now just hack everything apart with dull knives and plastic kiddie scissors.
If you can’t use the good scissors for any of these chores, what do you use them for? The only use I have for scissors is to cut paper, and I generally use single edge razor blades for that.
I have my gray handled good scissors, and I have made it very clear that they are only to be used to cut cloth. They reside in my craft room - however, my 4-year old grabbed them to cut some kind of paper. It was a close debate as to whether or not I would then grab the kitchen shears that are good for cutting bone
In a related fashion - where the hell is the scotch tape all the time? We’re pretty good with having crappy scissors available, but then the roll of tape is always gone. It leads to that frantic Saturday morning where you’re running late and the birthday party starts at noon, and it’s a half-hour drive, and you finally got the kids dressed and took a quick shower, and then you just have to wrap the present real quick…and then mom goes nuclear…
Good God, this is a crime! I recommend that you inform your husband that every time that he does this, you will use the family funds to buy both a replacement pair for you and a pair of EMT shears for him. Keep doing this until he has a pair for every place where he works (as if!), until the garage is paved with the things, or until he has to put off a home project because the rent money was spent on EMT shears.
Seriously, these things are cheap and they cut anything. They just don’t look pretty or do a pretty job.
Sateryn76, the Scotch Tape is in the dirty laundry, stuck to the sheets that your kid used to turn the bunk bed into a clubhouse.
I don’t experience this – at least with scissors. Everyplace I’ve lived, we have a Proper Place for the scissors, and Special Scissors (the culinary scissors, or, in one place, the cloth scissors) don’t get used for anything else.
I HAVe experienced it with other things, though. My father, although an engineer and mechanic, who treated his tools with utmost respect, would often simply grab a nearby butter knife to tighten a random screw. A lot of my childhood butter knives had anomalous corkscrew tips on them.
And some of the good pointed-end serrated meat knives, too.
I got so fed up with the crappy scissors they provide for us at work (these things don’t even cut paper well, much less the double-sided adhesive tapes we need to trim every five minutes) that I bought Fiskars Non-Stick scissors for work…I swear, my coworkers almost fell to their knees and blessed me the first time they used them! I have to order them off ebay now, since I can’t find them in stores, but I’ve bought a pair for every store I work at, just so I’m not frustrated on the one day I’m there a month! But at my home store, would you believe a customer actually stole them off the counter? THAT’S where the good scissors go!
In Mom’s house, there is a clear distinction between the sewing scissors and the everything-else scissors, and we all learned quickly that the sewing scissors were to be used for nothing but, but even among the everything-else scissors, there’s still a distinction between the good scissors and the others.
