Bad pens, good pens

You heard me… I said BAD PENS.  The scourge of humanity.  Flippy and I were at Office Depot a few months ago, and they had a clearance cart near the store entrance.  I can’t resist a clearance cart, and definitely could not resist the lure of cheap pens.  We bought a 10 pack of blue stick pens, and a 10 pack of black stick pens, for only 5 cents per bag!  The pens were labeled, “Office Depot value.  Stick pens with grip.  Quality assured, 100% laboratory tested.” I could spend an entire blog entry going on about what sort of scientist spends his or her life testing cheap pens in the lab, but instead, I’ll just stick to the subject and say that these pens are the worst pens I’ve ever encountered.  They do have ink in them, and they do write without glopping.  However, they’re constantly falling apart!  If you remove the cap and put it on the bottom of the pen, you pull the bottom plug out of the pen when you take the cap off.  When you take the cap off the top of the pen, you pull the entire pen mechanism, ink and all, out of the pen.  The pens have extra parts because of the special “grip”, so instead of just the ink tube and the pen casing falling apart, there are other small pieces to complicate things.  Once you’ve reassembled it, you’re still doomed, because the pen will just continue to fall apart.  I guess these pens might be okay if you glued them together, but otherwise they just fall to pieces as soon as you point them towards a sheet of paper.  It’s not just one bad pen, either… it’s all twenty of them, blue and black.  Maybe India isn’t completed skilled in pen manufacture yet.  It was first amusing, then frustrating, to try to do a crossword puzzle without ever removing my pen tip from the paper.  If I forgot and lifted the pen, it fell apart.  I found the horrid beasts on the Office Depot website.  I still have 17 of them here, mostly black, if you want me to send them to you, but if you request them, I’ll know you’re a masochist.

Luckily, I’ve got much, much better news pen news for you.  At Office Max, I saw a neat-looking and inexpensive pen called TUL.  They even have their own entertaining website at TUL.com, where you can have a humourous handwriting analysis. (It properly determined that my parents live in Canada.  I think it was a lucky guess).  I love these pens!  My favourite is a black 7mm gel pen, which writes smoothly and cleanly, and makes me want to take pen to paper, the old-fashioned way.  It costs about one dollar.  It’s rare for me to feel comfortable holding a pen, because I’ve spent the last decade using a keyboard for all my long thoughts.  I also like the blue 5mm retractable gel pens, but I think the 7mm line is a better fit for me.  5mm is for you “fine point” folks (my Mom is one of you).  While writing this entry, I found out that TUL makes a pack of gel pens in assorted colours, and my heart leapt.  It took over four decades to happen, but I believe I’ve finally found the pen for me!

I know that inexpensive pens aren’t common blog fodder, but wanted to share because the TUL pens would even make a nice gift for the writer or engineer in your family.  Flippy and I are going to give some to our fathers, former engineers, who love to have a good pen always at the ready.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/16 at 10:49 PM

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  1. I guess that demonstrates that you often get what you pay for!

    Posted by jg  on  11/21  at  11:28 AM
    2. Page 1 of 1 pages

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