As I sit here at my desk at my research job, making a chain of paperclips (33 long), I decided it might be worthwhile to discover the paperclip chain habits of other Dopers. Do you make them? Do you feel you must make them? Do you hate them? What’s the longest you’ve ever made? How often do you make them? Do you make them the cheap way, by inserting one into the outer loop of the next, or do you slide it all the way into the inner loop? Do you have any amusing anecdotes regarding paperclip chains? Did you ever imagine someone could ask so many questions about paperclip chains?
There used to be someone that clipped all their used paperclips together at work. They’d put them back in the supply cabinet and take a new box. The owner didn’t want to by anymore because there were some left. The smarter employees learned to throw away the paperclip chains so they had usable paperclips.
When I first started working full time, I went to Chinatown (in L.A.) and bought a carved wooden elephant as a desk decoration. At the end of my first year of work, I fastened a paperclip to the end of his trunk, where there is a little hole that goes all the way through.
Since then, in October of every year, I add another paper clip. After death, I plan to return to earth and haunt people, saying, “This is the chain I forged in life…” The chain is now 20 clips long.
I did this once, got to around 1500 chained together. I got bored at work and started chaining them together. Started off with 100 or so, then started adding to them for a couple of months. I put a tape mark every 100 so I could count them. I hung them on my cube wall and it went around a couple of times. I ended up getting laid off and I left it. I don’t know what happened to the chain.
Well, not much of a paperclip story, but …
Me and about five other guys (we were roommates) all drank together several times a week while we were in a Navy school in Florida. Early on, we started saving the straws. I showed them how I folded the straws into triangles, and then we started bringing our straws home after each night. By the end of 6 months of school, we have nearly 5000 of these straws linked together (like paperclips) in a chain. My liver still complains about it every now and then.
The paper chains made from gum wrappers were what I went for. I used note book paper though. The class always was held back by the slowest student. I would learn the material for math the first day and the teacher would take a week before they moved on. Day 2 - 5 I made paper chains. The teachers ignored me because I knew the material. I still have a 2 foot chain from the 70’s tac on a closet wall.
Pull tops from beer and soda cans (aw who am I kidding - it was all beer cans) Must have been 20 feet long. My age is showing. 
A lone rogue co-worker here insists on binding his files, by placing the paperclip on the left side in a spot about in the middle of the page. EX:
Top of paper
Paperclip (sideways) here
Bottom of paper
It drives me bonkers because it sticks to all of the other NORMALLY papercliped files.
Not paperclips, but I have a rubberband ball about the size of a volleyball. It weighs somewhere in the area of 8.5 pounds and I estimate it to have between 8000 and 10000 rubberbands on it (nothing in the middle either to ‘start’ it, it’s all rubber bands).
I’ll be supprised if the younger dopers don’t ask how you could connect pop top tabs.
Yes, it just begs the question!
How is this feat accomplished?
Mine’s only about a large softball-size…er…size. But same thing, nothing but rubber bands inside to start it.
HAHAHAHAHAHA…
I remember doing this. And I remember the gum wrapper chains.
Back on topic…
I personally don’t care much for paper clips, so I use them very sparingly. I do use them as bookmarks in textbooks, and will occasionally use them to fasten together papers that will not be together for very long. Mostly I use staples, though, since they don’t get snagged when you have several packets of paper to keep together (like student assignments that I have to grade).
My 11yo son, though, is no longer allowed access to paper clips in our house. He is an impulsive chain maker, and if he has more than one paperclip, they MUST be clipped together. It wouldn’t be so bad if he would at least put the paperclips back in the drawer after they have been put together, but he tends to hide them and hoard them, and then I can’t find one when I need one.
He spent a few hours in my cubicle at my university when his school was closed. Of course, he found my collection of paperclips in my drawer, and when I got back from my classes, my cubicle was decorated with a long paperclip chain. Apparently some colleagues had felt sorry for him, and gave him even more paperclips than I had in my drawer…
That was several months ago, and I am still taking the clips off the chain to use them. I did detach a rather long piece of the chain, and put it in the communal paperclip holder by the copier, as a way of saying “thanks” to my “thoughtful” colleagues.
Chains? No, never. But unbending them? Making them into little shapes? Er…isn’t that what we’re given paper clips for?
I was thinking about holding an art exibit made up of things people have done with paperclips, rubber bands, staples, etc. Call it the Inspiration of Utter Bordom.
Um…yeah, how DO you do that??
Look, I’m 29, and I’ve never see pop-top cans be linkable. Can someone please explain?
Kids!
Here is a site that will explain it Pull tops
It was a ring attached to the can that you lifted up and pulled out taking the ring and tab off the can
(note the first picture on the left from the site)
Pull tabs used to pull completely off the can.
Here is what they looked like.
You would wrap the end of one around the ring of the next tab.
I tried to find a picture of a tab chain, but no luck so far.
That’s the type of tab you need. I never expected to find fetish garments made from the tabs doing a google. That’s bad.
I confess to being a paperclip chain maker, especially when bored. I like to link them through the inner loop. I remember one day, left alone at my mother’s desk in her office while she was working elsewhere, I found a large box of clips and had at them. It was a couple of days before she discovered my little project and she wasn’t very happy about it.
I also made some dinky gum wrapper chains at school but I prefered to make staple chains as they required more technical skill and the risk of being stabbed by the pointy bits made the endeavor more fulfilling somehow.