100 Simple things we take for granted: #12 The Pencil
12# The Pencil
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| During the Space Race, NASA spent millions of dollars trying to invent a pen that would work in zero gravity conditions, i.e. in space. The Russians just used a pencil. |
By Sparklingjem.
When I was is primary school, you had to be granted your ‘penmanship’ by your teacher: meaning they gave you a certificate to say your handwriting had become good enough for you to start using a pen in class. Well mine wasn’t, in fact I never got mine. When the first few people in the class started using pens, they used to ‘forget’ to bring pencils to school so that when I asked to borrow one they could say, “Oh dear, I must have lost it. I thought this was strange because I had ALWAYS used a pencil.” Then they would whip out the fancy pens their parents had bought them for getting a stupid certificate and carry on with their work. I guess those events left me with a lifelong sense of camaraderie with the common pencil.
I will never forget the days when it was just me and my pencil against the rest of the world. And it was the old fashioned kind which you had to sharpen, not the clutch pencils which can be made to look like fancy pens and always run out of lead or you just plain stupidly ran out and bought the wrong size. In any case we often forget the humble pencil.
Here are some of the reasons a pencil should not be over looked:
1) The amount of lead left is the same as the length of the pencil, so you can always see how much you have left. Unlike with pens which tend to run out when you are sitting in the middle of an exam and have of course not brought a spare one with you so your argument just fades out and remains incomplete.
2) It can write upside down, in the freezing cold and on the moon. Obviously the last part will not make any difference to most of us but the fact that it works upside down makes it perfect for vandalizing the underside of your desk.
3) It can be used in over 50 different ways according to Purple Slinky. My favourite are:
- A pretend sword for office sword fights.
- Drumsticks to practise your beats when there is no one to sword fight.
- A pretend wand you can point at the office bitch/your boss and mutter "avada kedavra" under your breath and imagine a green light erupting from it and vaporising them.
They can be used to make pencil sculptures. Enough said!
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