The Paper Clip Affair

You’d never know to look at me that I’ve had a miserly love affair with paper clips. There is no date on the calendar that I can point to and say, “That’s when I fell in love.”

I was probably too busy learning a new job to think about paper clips the first few years I worked. Gradually I noticed clips and began to appreciate them as special little tools that made my life happier. Nothing in my mind can compare to a paper clip. It holds papers together until you want to separate them, and then you can remove it without a special tool and without leaving holes in the papers. There are many patents for paper clips according to Wikipedia, but the most common was never patented. Gem paper clips were produced in England in the early 1870’s. They still delight me today.

I suspect there is a quiet war going on in offices and homes all over the world. I don’t know about people in other professions, but accountants love staples. I loathe them – the staples, not accountants. Almost every set of papers that lands on my desk is stapled, and I’m usually asked to scan or copy them. You have to root around looking for the unstapler, snip at the pesky metal legs, jerk the middle part and stare at the big holes you’ve now ripped in the upper left corner which are guaranteed to get hung in the automatic feeder. What is there to love about a staple? If you’re not careful, you can draw blood if one is hidden and you rake your finger across it the wrong way. There is no right way to rake a staple. Still, considering human nature, I’m sure battle lines could be drawn up for those favoring either clips or staples.

 Sometime in the middle 90’s paper clips became important to me, especially the colored ones. I never, ever bought that kind, since they are more expensive than standard metal ones. However, I have a wonderful collection of them. Every time an interesting one passed through my hands, I substituted a plain one and put the prize in a pretty glass container on my desk. I use them only on boomerang papers – those that are sure come back to me. Right now the prime use is for holding audit reports before they are proof read. I delighted in all the bright colors and then fell hard for the striped ones. Oh! They are so much fun! If Dr. Seuss had designed a paper clip, it would be one of those.

I have to admit that segregation thrives on my desk. There are the loved colored clips and the tolerated plain ones. They have their own containers and do not mix. The plain ones have their ranks, too. For no reason at all, I do not like crinkled ones, much preferring the smooth ones. And then there are the detested mangled ones. At some point they were used for jobs that were too big for them, or they were squeezed sideways and looked pinched the rest of their lives. Whenever I prepare a bank deposit, I look through the plain clips and pick one I don’t want to see again.

Recently I found a particularly mean little clip to send to our bank. It’s a legal way of getting rid of one, since I have a personal law that I cannot throw away a usable clip. Normally Leslie takes the deposits to the bank on her lunch hour. I think she must get the same teller most days, because the carbon and the bank print come back stapled together. They are usually done the way I like them, with the carbon behind the print and both right side up. That is one instance in which I’m glad to trade a clip for a staple. I get rid of an ugly clip and pay no attention to the staple. Today my ploy backfired! The deposit slip came back with its bank print held together with the bent clip I had banished. It seemed to grin at me, knowing it had come back to torment me when I tried to banish it.