We all laughed, thank you!
And after a discussion, I’m going to box most of them up and give’em to the technical college. The students will be happy to have them.
After reading your post, LSLGuy, I went to the desk drawer to find out how many staples I have, just out of curiosity
20,000! 4 unopened boxes of 5,000. Plus one opened box. Jeezooie!
The box that I finally finished had 5,000 (not 500) and it took 22 years to use them all.
I’d donate them to some needy organization but I don’t think anyone is quite that needy.
Ok get you a small round nose pliers and I’ll give you a clever craft idea.
I have a few Hawaiian shirts.
Like several hundred.
Could be worse. I have the same box of staples and might use maybe one staple a year. But in addition, I have a box of staples for a staple gun, and yet another box of rounded staples for a different staple gun used for fastening cables. Both of those are used even less frequently than the paper staples, meaning, nowadays, pretty much never!
Most interesting post I’ve seen in a while, on any topic.
My contribution to this thread: manila folders. I guess it makes sense, as the digital version (kindly retaining the iconic imagery) gradually replaces the hard-copy one, in one realm of life after another.
Kind words, JKellyMap. I may do an extended version of the story (and other PI stories) in another thread someday.
T-shirts. When my wife goes resale shopping she’ll ask me if I need anything, and I’ll say 'pick me up a cool t-shirt or two with interesting or amusing things printed on them like the ones you’ve gotten me in the past" and she’ll say “not until you pick out some to get rid of. You have like 1000 t-shirts and you only regularly wear like 10 of them”.
But she doesn’t understand. I have levels of t-shirts. There are my everyday favorites, yes. Then there are the ones that are a little frayed or beat-up-- those are good for situations where I’m going to be doing something that could ruin one of my ‘good’ Ts, but I still want to look halfway decent. Like when we go out kayaking. There are the torn, holey Ts covered in paint and deck stain that I keep for dirty jobs. Like painting or staining decks. Finally, there are the ones just a size too small, a bit tight around the stomach area, that I keep for when I lose 30+ lbs and regain 6-pack abs 
Ratatouille-- sometimes it comes out the way it went in:
Looking forward to it.
I share this pain.
But in my case I have a trusty staple gun. It was even a Swingline, a longstanding name in all things staply. It dates from the 1980s I think. I finally used the last of its staples a couple years ago. Only to find that Swingline had long ago abandoned making workshop staplers for office staplers only. And despite all the assurances that staples are a “standard size” between brands, that’s simply not true. After much running around to hardware stores and multiple non-returnable Amazon purchases seeking new staples for an old stapler I gave up.
So for much less than the price and hassle of the wrong staples I bought a new stapler by a now-common brand. Which of course doesn’t take any of the staples I did buy. And whose correct ammo only comes in boxes of 500. I’ll probably use a dozen of that 500 before I die.
Where my story diverges from yours is that I then happily threw the old stapler and newly bought incompatible staples away. There was a moment’s nostalgia for all the times I’d used that trusty, not rusty, and still fully functional gun. Then the tool was gone and the memories remain. I know you’d have given it a decent burial somewhere in your basement that resembles a much more crowded version of where the US government stashed the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the lost Ark. 
It’s not a huge thing, but I have at least 18 pads of 8.5x11 lined paper, some essentially new, some all but used up with just a few sheets left, most in between somewhere.
Given how little I handwrite these days, I will still have most of these pads when I die twenty or thirty years down the road, and my son can throw them away.
So you’ve seen my basement? You couldn’t swing a cat down there without hitting boxes and/or old furniture. Most of those boxes contain stuff that will never, ever be used again. Some have simply been moved as is from the previous basement, and were last packed many decades and several moves ago. Some have sentimental value but no earthly use, like an elaborate large-scale electric train set.
Are you my older brother? His garage is packed to the gills with boxes the contents of which haven’t seen the light of day in at least 35 years. This includes two drum sets that haven’t been played since the 1960s and a Lionel train set from the 1950s. God only knows what else is there.
When my favourite sports announcer (Ray Turnbull) retired and there was a televised retirement bash for him, he mentioned in passing that he wore a different jacket for every single broadcast. He must have done on the order of a thousand of them. Unless he then donated them to Goodwill his closet would have been overflowing. I assume the network paid for them.
Pho cups. Or quart cups if you’ve ever worked in food service. I use them for just about everything. I drink from them because they hold a lot of water and don’t knock over easily. I use them to microwave leftovers because a tall cylinder is the perfect shape for that. I use them to store leftovers because they have lids that fit beautifully, and I hate rummaging around for the right tupperware lid.
They are just a functionally perfect design. And they build up because we order pho a few times per year, and they seldom wear out.