I tried to staple a receipt to a bill this morning, and instead of the satisfying “ka-chunk” of a little silver staple being driven home, I heard nothing. The stapler pressed quietly into the papers with a metallic sigh, like an old man easing into bed.
Out of staples.
Now, this would not be a moment of panic for any normal person, but I felt my heart race in my chest. “Where in the world would we keep extra staples?” I wondered.
See, my wife used to be the go-to clerk when it came time to requisition and stock office supplies in our house, but since her stroke four-and-a-half years ago, those duties have fallen to me. And I’ve done pretty well with most of those duties, facing each challenge as it arose.
But it occurred to me that, not only had I never bought staples, I had never loaded a strip of them into the stapler since her stroke.
Which must mean that the old stapler had been running on staples that my wife had loaded into it more than four years ago. Evidence that we’ve either gone mostly paperless in our household, or at least have made our peace with loose sheets floating around.
I took a guess about where our staple-trove might be, and I found a half-box of them way in the back of a desk drawer. And then I found another half-box buried to the side of the same drawer.
I loaded the stapler, happy that I had met yet another challenge in my new life as household office manager.
After serving as home-office stock boy for the past four years, I have a pretty good idea of how long we can get by before the shopping list will include paper, stamps, printer ink, bank checks, pencils, or envelopes. But staples? How long did I have to go before I had to worry about re-supplying?
I started to do the math.
There are 175 staples in a standard strip, a fact I happen to know thanks to the extensive research involved in counting how many staples there are in a standard strip. The average person might find it a waste of time to count how many staples there are in a standard strip, but I am a writer, and if a writer weren’t conducting important staple research, he would probably be wasting his time counting how many vent-holes there are in the cold-air return next to his desk (36).
So, yes, I counted them. 175 per strip is the number I came up with.
And then, after conducting further exhaustive staple research, I found a sentence on the side of the box that said “210 staples per strip.” Go figure.
The box also says, “Caution: staples have sharp points.” But I had already learned that fact through earlier exhaustive staple research.
Assuming that the last strip of 210 staples had been loaded into the stapler sometime around five years ago, that means that we use about 42 staples a year, or three-and-a-half staples a month. Not as many as I would have guessed.
I scanned the office to see if I could verify the accuracy of those numbers, and the only place I could find used staples was in the folder where I keep certain bills that I pay online, print out a receipt, and ka-chunk the receipt to the bill as a reminder that it has been paid. But because I often pay four or five bills at one time, one staple might do the job on all of them.
Try as I might, I could not find that half-staple anywhere.
Nonetheless, after some high-level math work and a tuna sandwich, I calculated that at this rate my newly-installed strip of 210 staples should last until 2019.
But there was more important research to do, lest my attention should turn to something frivolous, like counting how many louvres there are on the window screens in my office (78, not counting the thick ones at the bottom.)
I had twelve strips of staples in one half-box of staples in the drawer, and an exact number of staples in the other half-box—a coincidence I found fascinating and worth exploring, but perhaps at some later date. I still had math to do.
I calculated that each box of 12 strips of 210 staples per strip contained 2,520 staples. Because I have two half-boxes of staples, that means that our office warehouse has 5,040 staples just waiting to get in the game sometime after 2019, when the stapler wheezes softly onto the waiting paper again.
Which means, if my math is correct (a dubious assumption, because our 68 remaining paper-clips have been crying out for my attention), I won’t have to worry about running out to Staples for more staples for about 125 years—or sometime around 2139.
And by then—and here is the point you’ve been waiting so patiently for me to get to—our remaining staples will be bona fide antiques for our great-great-great grandkids to sell on E-bay.
Of course, as with all antiques, you have to have some proof that those staples have actually been sitting around in a desk drawer for 125 years. You have to establish provenance.
Which is why I’m writing this story today.
I’ll clip this story out, my darling great-great-great grandkids, and save it for you. When you sell those ancient staples on E-bay sometime in the mid-22nd century, this paper will be your provenance. Ka-chunk it to the bill of sale.
That is, if you can get anybody in the 22nd century to believe that people actually once wrote words on a thing called “paper,” which came from a thing called “trees.”
Of course, if the market for antique staples has collapsed by then, you could always use them as body-piercings. That could be cool, too.
