My stapler died on Friday.
I thought it was going to be a quick fix with the staples having jammed inside, but when I opened him up and the staples were all lined up nicely, I knew that something was terribly wrong. I rang for Ms O in reception – a woman with over thirty years of stationary resuscitation experience, but it was beyond even her help.
I suppose twenty-one years is a pretty good run for something that gets forcibly snapped together, but I can’t help thinking it could have turned thirty if only I hadn’t forced poor Stampy to get his teeth into things thicker than he should have. It was also the last piece of the old me, having survived since my first day at the zoo. The unbreakable metal ruler had long since bent and snapped, and my favourite pens had stopped working because they could or had migrated without my permission to other people’s desks.
Although I know that Stampy will have to be replaced with an elchaepo made in China by a Filipino model (model of stapler that is, although who knows what state the Filipino fashion circuit is in), I’m still going to keep Stampy as a paperweight reminder of the me that once was.
Ms rest-in-one-tightly-bound-piece M.
