It was much to my great chagrin that I discovered recently that my company has suddenly stopped ordering all the various pens we used to stock, and replaced them all with cheap stick ballpoint pens, in order to save money. I don't know about you, but I am very particular about the pens I use. I detest anything larger than a fine point, don't like very heavy or very light-weight pens, don't like those rubberized grip thingies, etc.
However, more importantly, the work I do requires a lot of signatures on various documents, and we have to keep photocopies of every one of these documents, and the copies have to clearly show the signatures. So here's the problem - ballpoint ink just doesn't photocopy well at all. Also? I've lost nearly all my good pens (at least, all the ones with blue ink, which is the color you are supposed to use for original signatures, so they can be easily distinguished from the copies).
This was very upsetting to me. So I bitched to the office manager, and amazingly, he actually agreed to buy me my own special box of rollerball pens to use for signing. But of course, it was all super-secret-hush-hush-don't-tell-anyone-else-or-they're-all-going-to-want-the-special-pens. And I better hope no one steals them from me (as I suspect has already happened, since I used to have, like 15 of the good pens, and I now have only two, and I know I lose them sometimes, but I don't think I've lost that many), because I doubt he's going to buy me any more after this one time.
He also told me how much money they saved by buying the cheap pens, and told me how much they'd spent in total in the last year. It works out to approximately $200 per person. Do you know how many pens that amounts to, especially when the pens are bought in bulk, not retail? A whole fucking lot of pens, is what. Either the office manager is lying, or there are a lot of people here pilfering pens, because no one could possibly go through that many pens, no matter how much work they may claim they are doing.
In other news, I made a new food invention. I decided to just get a small soup for lunch today, since I'll be having a big dinner tonight at my parents house. It's kind of a pre-Thanksgiving family dinner, since regular Thanksgiving tomorrow will be a huge extended family affair with all sorts of aunts and uncles and cousins and whatnot. So anyway, I'm eating my small soup, and I finish the crackers that came with it, when I remember that I still have that bag of Cape Cod potato chips in my desk from yesterday's lunch meeting that for some reason I hadn't eaten yet. I know, hard to believe, that a bag of chips could just sit in my desk without being eaten, but it's true.
I didn't really feel like eating the chips on their own, but instead decided they might be tasty in the soup. It was minnestrone soup, by the way, and actually wasn't too salty, unlike most restaurant soups (because if it had been really salty already, it would have been a little too much to add the salty chips too). And let me tell you, chips in soup? Really good. I know people who put chips in sandwiches (which is just weird), and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere has put chips in soup, but it's no one I've ever heard of, so I'm claiming it as my invention.
Feel free to use my brilliant new idea to your heart's content. Just remember to send me any appropriate royalties.
Labels: aggravation, bad math, food, money, office supplies, work
