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](Chicago Suburbs News - Chicago Tribune
)CMC fnord!
(Excerpted from Wholecloth Publishing’s The Passive-Aggressive Office: Dos, Don’ts, and Go-Ahead-See-if-I-Cares):
Chapter Four: Stapling for Emphasis.
Much as Charlotte de la Tour codified for the Victorians a virtual language of flowers, today’s office has at its disposal myriad ways to convey emotions and thoughts using readily available staples as words and their placement as grammar. This makes possible such sophisticated “unofficial” communications as:
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One staple, vertical, upper left – “Here is the document you wanted.”
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Three staples, diagonal, upper left – “My stapler is unreliable.”
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One staple, horizontal, lower right – “This document probably made more sense in the original Urdu.”
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Four staples, across top – “THANK! GOD! IT’S! FRIDAY!”
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Five staples, top center & each corner – “In twelve years, nobody in this organization has listened to anything I’ve said or read anything I’ve written. Behind the cover sheet is twenty-two pages of pornography plagiarized from magazines I stole from a Tijuana candy store. You won’t notice, either.”
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Twenty-seven staples, random placement: “Ha-ha! I stole your staple remover!”
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One staple, center left, with red splotch – “OH SHIT I JUST STAPLED THE WEBBING OF MY FUCKING THUMB TO THE QUARTERLY REPORT SOMEBODY GET ME SOME GAUZE OR SOMETHING OH DAMN IT DAMN IT DAMN IT!!!”
Sorry, but I don’t, for even a minute, buy the idea that they won’t give you a staple remover.
I’m tickled by the thought of an jobbwhere you have to ask for office supplies.
Everywhere I’ve worked, it’s always been need --> see --> take.
Never worked for the goverment have you? There is always talk of goverment waste. “The goverment is buying this or that” they say. I want to meet the people that are spending this money. Every goverment employee I have had to work with refused to spend money. Even for something as small as a staple remover.
It took me a few minutes to realize that sturmhauke was joking. Not sure if I should be depressed at my lack of humor, or saddened at the state of goverment.
The King of Soup thanks, my roommate thinks I am a few staples short of a full swingline.
Be glad you are leaving NinjaChick. Hope you have a better time at your new job.
-Otanx
I worked at one job where they made us buy most of our own office supplies (you know, fancy stuff like staplers and pens). I wish I was kidding. I went and bought my own stuff, and labelled it all in huge black letters with my name, and took it all with me when I left. Bastards.
My old job was like that. to the point where my boss actually encouraged me to take pens, pencils, and folders for my own personal use.
NinjaChick, say hello to Biggirl. Perhaps it’s the advent of Spring that brings out the stapler beast in us all.
Boy, I remember those days well, featherlou – I worked for an office once where the guy in charge of supplies would not order new paperclips until we were completely out, and then it would take up to two weeks to get the new supply from Office Supplies 'R Cheap. Or buying my own left-handed scissors and writing my name all over them to the point where people were afraid to even look at them, let alone touch them.
Having worked for the gummint for several years, may I offer the single most useful piece of advice I garnered in my years feeding at the public trough:
**Make Friends With the Supply Clerk. **
I would get a call whenever a new supply order would come in so I could go down and help myself to whatever I needed. Naturally, I turned into a Supply Hoarder™, which I am to this day; it’s a constant struggle not to clean out the supply aisle at Costco just so I’ll have those 48 different colored Sharpies in case I ever need them! But the only, I repeat only way to survive as a gummint employee is to Make Friends With the Supply Clerk!
Yep, there truly are some offices where you simply CANNOT have the office supplies you need. Happened to me at an AFL-CIO union office, the beotch in charge would decide if you actually needed those post-it notes (after she got done reading every single piece of paper that came into or went out of the office).
Seems like staplers are usually a premium item - you really want an Ace Cadet Liftop (model 302) if you mean business. Short, but sweet. Staple remover? You’ve got to sleep with someone to get your hands on one of those.
The best stapler is my mother’s. It’s about 40 years old, solid metal, best stapler in the entire universe. I actually insisted she put a codicil in her will giving me that stapler; I don’t want anybody else to get their greedy hands on it! Why yes, I do covet my mother’s stapler, why do you ask?
And for staple removers, my all-time favorite is the Swingline Premium Staple Remover. Causes the least damage of any out there. Buy your own; write your name on it in permanent marker; take it with you from job to job. You’ll never be staple-removerless again. 
That’s the negative feedback loop that supply misers set up. An order of supplies comes in, and everybody knows it’s feast or famine, so everybody scrabbles to grab all the supplies they can because they know there aren’t more where those came from (not in a timely fashion, anyway).
I have to say, the bad feelings that this kind of stinginess with supplies causes is all out of proportion with how little effort and money it would take to make supplies freely available (and have employees feeling like they are actually valued by the company, not resented).
The feeling you get when you have a stapler that reliably staples more documents than you expect it to and never jams, and a staple remover that first time, every time, just grabs those staples out - it’s indescribable to someone who hasn’t worked in an office. Not orgasmic or anything, just so damned satisfying.
Ah, but I have something better! Mine has a magnet by the tip that holds the staples in place until I shake them into the trash. No more fingers getting poked when trying to remove the staples from the little gap. No more staples all over the counter. Bliss.
Hello, my name is Madd Maxx and I hoard writing utensils. And colored paper clips. And just about any type of office supply I can get my hands on. 
I have a whole drawer devoted to “spare” office supplies. Things get so bad around here that after layoff’s people start scavenging the recently departed cubicles for any usable office supplies. I have had people leave me supplies when they get laid off, like a person might leave someone a trinket in a will. That is how I got my electric stapler.
Ooh, an electric stapler. The Holy Grail of office supplies.
HAH! Is that a real book? I can’t find it on Amazon.
Update for anyone interested:
Last night (I’m on the night-shift) I talked to my manager about it again. The proper way for Edit to indicate not to enter a section is to x out the entire page with a red pen. It is not to draw an x through the first page of five which shouldn’t be entered, and then staple those pages together at the bottom right.
Manager said that she’d write a memo, and see about getting some staple removers, as I’m not the only one complaining. I also told her that (entirely unrelated to the staplejerks) Friday is going to be my last day, since I’m leaving the country a week from today, and my god that felt good to say.
In my one and only Office Job, one of my tasks was to monitor and reorder office supplies. In my stupidity, I thought this meant reordering things when they got low, so as to Not Completely Run Out Of Stuff. Imagine my surprise when the office manager took me aside and reamed me out … um, I mean, corrected me. I was not to reorder supplies of basic necessities like paper clips and toner and boxes of paper until we were completely out and had an order totaling over $100. :smack:
We ordered from Office Depot and they delivered within 48 hours, but still. What a stupid policy.
Even though I was the Supply Clerk, I still was something of a Hoarder. I’d always stash a box of paper clips and a handful of pens in my file drawer behind the hanging files.