Disposable pens miss the point
Lori Borgman | Monday, Feb 01, 2010
Reduce, reuse and recycle has become the Eleventh Commandment. But try
finding a refill for a ballpoint pen.
I have two
favorite ballpoint pens. My allegiance to these pens is so deep that I have
clung to them for at least four, maybe five weeks.
Both of my
new favorite pens ran dry, so I wondered if I might be able to purchase refills.
There is an aisle of pens the length of a football field at the big box
store. To look at each and every pen, you would need to get to the store when it
opened, pack a sack lunch and hope you were finished looking by the time they
closed. Wear comfortable shoes. And take a folding chair.
In the ever expanding universe of pens -- fat tip, fine point, gel, sparkle,
retractable, indelible, washable and erasable -- there is not a single refill.
The operating principle for the pen is “Use it, and then lose it.”
There is a Walton’s episode stuck in my head where someone stole John Boy’s
pen. It was a crisis on the order of the Bay of Pigs. They turned the house
upside down looking for the pen and then turned on one another.
You haven’t seen vicious until you’ve seen hill folk fight over a pen. You
don’t steal a man’s pen. It either turned out to be some shirt-tail
relation that had stolen the pen, or an older guy Mary Ellen was seeing on the
sly. Either way, John Boy got the pen back and Walton’s Mountain again slept
peacefully at night.
I came of age when pens were forbidden until the fourth grade. It was a rite
of passage: the fountain pen. You had to jab a little cartridge onto the poker
thing so the ink could flow. If you didn’t get a direct hit the first time –
and there was a less than 10 percent chance you would -- you’d have ink all over
your fingers, palms, desk, paper and clothing. Exasperated, you would then brush
your hair out of your face streaking blue ink across your forehead and leaving a
smear at the corner of your eye.
Children routinely arrive home covered in blue ink. Mothers would say,
“Learning to use a pen, are you?”
How did they know? We thought our mothers were brilliant. Clairvoyant
even.
The point is, no matter how many times that pen blew up, and even humiliated
you, you kept it. You didn’t go to the store and buy another one or two or three
or 10. You kept that same pen and reused it year after year after year until the
Bic was invented.
In one
stroke, life changed. You didn’t refill a Bic; you threw it out. The faster
people threw them out, the faster Bic made them. People began throwing pens into
kitchen junk drawers, desk caddies, glove boxes, pants pockets and purses. Soon
there were 3,978 ballpoint pens per person. And only two of them worked.
Today –
and I hope you’re not reading, John Boy -- the ballpoint pen has all the value
of a cigarette butt.
You can spend $5 on an energy-saving light bulb, hundreds on low-flow toilets
and low-water-usage washing machines, thousands on energy efficient windows and
heating and air conditioning systems, but good luck finding a 99-cent
refill for a pen.
Somewhere along the line we’ve missed the point.
