Wayback Wednesday: Pencils

I remember when I was a kid and I would go to school and do all of my work with a pencil. There was always the old hand crank pencil sharpener up on the black board and I had to raise my hand to ask the teacher if I could go sharpen my pencil.

Life was so much easier back then.

Then along came junior high and I didn’t want to be a little kid anymore so you started using a pen and about the only thing you ever used a pencil for was my math homework.

Before I knew it I was out is the working world, using a pen for everything and I’ll bet I had not used a pencil for anything other than keeping my miniature golf score in at least fifteen years.

Suddenly I found my self thinking, “What has happened to pencils in the last twenty years? What technological marvels of writing may pencils have become in all of this time? Heck, do pencils even exist anymore?”

I guess I have seen them around occasionally. I think I even have a few at home in the junk drawer or something, but they have old crusty and hard erasers that wouldn’t work worth a crap.

Then as fate would have it, I was rummaging through the supply cabinet at work the other day looking for a new pen, and ran across a box of pencils way back in the corner. The box was a little tattered on the corners and not in the greatest of condition, indicating that it had probably been sitting in the supply cabinet for quite some time. Well I knew we had an electric pencil sharpener over by the copying machine, because I had passed it on many occasions but never had the opportunity to use it. Well, darn it “today was going to be different” I thought to myself, and I took a pencil from the box instead of the pen that I had originally been searching for and walked down to the sharpener to sharpen that puppy up.

Well I’m here to tell you my life has changed since that day. Using a pencil is so much more fun than using a pen. I think there ought to be a law requiring the use of pencils instead of pens. I’m sure there are the environmentalist whack jobs out there that would disagree with me and explain to me how pencils require chopping down 85 trillion trees a year, and that an area the size of China is deforested each year harming 23 million species and making 7.5 million species extinct each year and so on, and so on. But I’m here to tell you I don’t give a rat’s ass about any of that.

The psychological benefits of using a pencil and the harmony that it has created in my life, if spread amongst all the humans on the earth could give us a world that is nearly as peaceful and great as the fabled nirvana. And I’m not kidding. Pencils are freaking awesome! Using a pencil can make even the most mundane of tasks seem like a terrific childhood memory revisited.

Everyone thinks paying bills are a drag right? Well not with a pencil. Writing out those checks feels just like writing an exciting essay about what you did on summer vacation. And aren’t you tired of getting autographs of baseball players on expensive new baseballs, and then it turns out the player sucks and you’ve just wasted a great new $20 baseball? Well, use a pencil dummy. That way if down the road it turns out the guy stinks or he gets traded to some crappy team you hate (like the Yankees) then you can just erase that crap off of your ball an BAM! No more Nick Hall, now you can get Kyle Drabek on that thing. Brand new ball again, just like that!

Damn people, I’m here to tell you. Pencils RULE!

Get a pencil today.

You’ll be glad you did.

EDIT: Forget about what I said about writing checks with your pencils. While it WAS initially fun it turns out that 32.68 check I thought I sent to Verizon for my cell phone bill actually paid for someone’s trip to Key West.

BEWARE OF PENCILS!

PENCILS SUCK!