Too Many Staples

I was in need of some staples at school today. I had recently acquired a newly donated ‘drug rep’ stapler for my classroom (it’s purple, if you care) and was stapling papers for class. (What else would I do with it . . . . well, I could have been using it as an obtrusive tweezers, but I wasn’t . . . I was stapling.) A short jaunt into my work, I ran out of the obligatory staples the tool came with. I suspect the drug company expects they can avoid looking too cheap by including a small . . . what is a row of staples called??? Pardon me while I peruse the internet . . . according to Everything2.com, a row of staples is called a “herringbone series.” So the drug company included a herringbone series of 50 staples, thus leaving me longing and looking for more.

I found a box and was truly amazed to realize that staple packages are neither created for, nor marketed to the individual consumer. The small box I found, which was roughly 4 1/2” x 1 1/8” x 1 5/8”, contained 5,000 staples. How was I to ever need 5,000 staples? Consider this. At a minimum, the typical sane person uses one staple to connect two or more pages. (I say ‘typical sane’ because I have used numerous staples on one piece of paper while creating a battle-ready, rubber band propelled hornet (as named by this seven step, instructional website, which, by the way, left off step 2.5, encase the folded paper in staples). I would theorize (though for reasons that may soon be obvious, I haven’t tested my theory) that an individual staple can be reasonably expected to connect 9 pieces of paper before staples begin to become damaged and ineffective. To justify purchasing 5,000 staples, the aforementioned typical sane person should plan on connecting 10,000 to 45,000 pieces of paper into various packets over their lifetime.

I spent part of my day contemplating why staple producers would have chosen such a gratuitous number. Perhaps they are only marketing to corporate America. Perhaps the creation of staples is so inexpensive, that creating and selling an excess is necessary to turn a profit . . . okay, that doesn’t make sense. My favorite reason accompanies a mental picture. Imagine walking through a store; let’s choose one at random – Staples, looking for some metal bullets for your super-duper paper connector. Aah, there they are, but which package is right for you? 5,000? No, too many. There it is. You reach and pick up a tiny package the size of your thumbnail – 10 staples. Perfect. And the cost is even better - $0.00002.

Of course, life is full of irony. I just finished the budget for next month and went to staple last month’s budget together. Wouldn’t you know it, I’m out of staples.