That Was Easy

Something happened to me at work today that blew my fragile little mind.

Today I learned that our printer is so awesome that it will print your document AND STAPLE IT TOGETHER.

OMFG! Printers that can staple shit? That is AMAZING.

I'm not kidding about being excited. This is so cool. Apparently, if you pick the appropriate settings on your computer, your printer will not only print but staple, thereby eliminating that little extra task that allowed you to spend another 10 seconds away from your desk.

I guess this is old news for most people, but I'd never seen this before, and reacted in the same way Lloyd Christmas did when he learned that we landed on the moon.

My hope, of course, is that this new technology does not turn stapler fights into archaic contests, much like firearms did away with jousting.

But seriously, this is the best news I’ve heard all week. Even though I’m pretty handy and can put together an IKEA desk with little-to-no problem, I’m surprisingly terrible at stapling. You would be amazed at the atrocities that have been visited on staples by my clumsy, awful hands. I don’t even want to mention how much I have ravaged the corners of documents, sometimes to the point where the whole thing has to be discarded so that I may attempt once again to bind it together without further loss of blood or dignity.

Few things are as awkward as screwing up a stapling job. “Sure, lunch sounds good. Hold on, let me staple this thing quickly,” you say to the cute girl who just asked if you wanted to take a break from studying and go to lunch. So both of you go to where the staplers are. And you grab a stapler and try to staple. And then the stapler jams, of course. So you smile grimly and struggle to open the stapler back up to unjam it, and can’t, and you’re grunting like a chimpanzee who just got asked to open a jar. Finally, it comes loose and opens, but does so all at once, so now staples fly everywhere. And now you and the girl have to crouch and pick up staplers. And of course, here is the perfect opportunity for one of those clichéd, oops, our hands have brushed and isn’t there electricity in the air moments, but that doesn’t happen. What happens is you bump heads. Twice. So that sucks. Finally, you get all the staples back in the stapler and try again. This time, you are able to staple, but the actual stapling sucks. Instead of a clean, tight stapling job, the staple’s all bent and askew and sprawled out akimbo like someone who just fell off a skyscraper. It is an inadequate job of stapling, a wholly useless staple that will not hold anything together. So you have to get rid of the staple, but sombitch won’t come out easily, and you fiddle with this thing with non-existing fingernails, and every movement tears up and bends your paper more and more. And it isn’t until the corner of the paper looks like it was chewed on for a couple of minutes that you see the little staple-removal-jaw-thingy that would have made this so much easier and was, of course, right there. Then you remember that, oh yeah, cute girl is waiting, so you look up and acknowledge her, and she is smiling the grim smile reserved only for those morons who fail to accomplish even the simplest of tasks within any amount of time that would be excessive for even a drunk baby. So you say, Sorry, and she says, that’s OK, and then looks at her watch. Crap. So you try again, and this time you do staple, and the staple is tight and neat, but goddamnit it’s halfway off the page, hanging there like a useless dangling chad. Tarnation. And then cute girl says something like, “Not very good with your fingers, eh?” Which is right up there with a girl calling you “bro” in that list of things girl say to you to communicate the idea that nothing will ever, ever happen between you two.

Now, however, I have learned that the machines are willing and able to perform this thankless task for me, and now I'm free to find other ways to screw up a lunch date. I anticipate having no trouble doing so.

Meanwhile, I'll be content with the knowledge that we have engineered a way to get automatic stapling. Technology these days, man. Ain't America something.