Established 1776

With your help, we can raise $1,000,000 of awareness.

Your Loyalty Costs Less than $2

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (6 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...

People who get excited about high-end office supplies

People whose love cannot be bought for $1.24

Another thing I don’t think I’ll understand, in addition to free lunch people at the office, is people who get all excited about killer office supplies, a la, “wow, my last office only had the Bic rollerball, but we’re rollin’ with Pilot V5’s up in here! Check out the glide!”

milton1

Every office I’ve ever worked in has these people, and they’re not always the Miltons of the world, either. Oftentimes, I’ll walk into a meeting with some VPs or executives and they’ll be having their chit-chat before the beginning of the meeting with the obligatory, “Did you see the game?”, “How much longer until your bride gets her green card?”, and, “Have you seen the pens they’ve got on the third floor?” People will literally leave their Mont Blanc on the table and seek out these pens upon hearing this. Unfathomable.

There’s one person I work with who illustrates this perfectly. On all other accounts, this guy is perfectly normal: someone you’d hang out with on the weekend, even. But when it comes to office supplies, he isn’t playing.

A few weeks ago, he was telling me about how he had just thrown his “like, 14th pen away this month,” and was just pissed. Then he noticed the pen I had on my desk.

“Where did you get that?” he asks.

“In the supply closet…” I say. He immediately gets up and walks away, presumably to check the closet. He returns with a fistful of crappy pens.

“All they have in there is this bullshit pen I’m using already. Let me just save them the time,” and he throws away no less than 35 pens in one motion of his arm. “I’ll be right back,” he says, leaving again.

About 10 minutes later, he returns, this time with about 6 types of pens, “Ok. These are the pens from every floor. 6 fucking types! Who is the idiot buying this stuff?” He tests each pen to see which ones perform and which don’t. “OK, these two are good. These four suck,” throwing 4 more pens into his quickly-rising pen graveyard. Then he pulls out his camera phone and takes pictures of the two good pens.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Sending these pictures to the dumb bitches who buy this stuff so they know how to do their fucking job. Hey, what are you doing this weekend?”

“umm….I have plans.”

Yeah, true story.

Now I will admit, I do wonder a little bit when I’m working in an office that goes the cheapo route on everything, like when you get fake stick-its and some tape that’s straight out of a Chinese prison sweatshop, called something like “Happy Happy Tape”. From this front, I can understand why companies try to project an image with their office supplies, or at least avoid a bad image. Nobody wants to work in that sad little office with the knock-off supplies, disgusting fabric cubicle walls from the 80’s, and big computer monitors that hum under the stress of their age. Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

I guess companies will just have to find a happy balance here. With the economy in its current state, we might have to pull back on office supply spending, but businesses have to do it responsibly. My brother in law just got an email announcing that the coffee creamer will no longer be supplied by the company. That pissed a lot of people off, but it’s all worth it, because it’ll save the company $352.38 over the next 6 years.

Share with other people:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • del.icio.us
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • Sphinn
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

October 29, 2008 | Filed Under at work 

comments

2 Responses to “Your Loyalty Costs Less than $2”

  1. Jess on October 30th, 2008

    My paralegal never orders anything! I have to tell AND email her when we’re down to THREE and then TWO reams of paper before she will reorder. One day, we ran out of paper AND our toner cartridge died. The look on my boss’s face… I feared for the paralegal’s safety.
    This might explain why my boss and I are pen thieves. I find pens in my bag I have no idea where they came from.
    Buy him an expensive pen (like I did) and it never moves from his desk. Let him see the receptionist’s “expensive” (to her and no one else) $3.00 pen and it’s Gone! Two days later, you find it and it’s been chewed on and the clip has been ripped off as if a rabid, pen using bear broke into our office.

  2. Heather on October 30th, 2008

    I think your 2nd to last paragraph perfectly describes our office.

Leave a Reply




  • subscribe to this blog



     Subscribe to RSS

    Subscribe with Bloglines

    Add to Google

    Add to Technorati Favorites

    why you are here...

    You are here because you are awesome and you celebrate awesomeness.

    You are here to read a new post every weekday.

    You are here because there are two types of people in the world: people who are here, and people who suck.