Keeping It Together in a Crazy world
Sometimes when you look in a junk drawer a bit of brilliance comes not from what you find so much as from what is missing. Today, I discovered zip ties, some bread ties (see “Daily Bread,” a very much used roll of medical tape, duct tape?—you really need to ask?, and a box of unused staples. Now the staples were not the jewel-encrusted gold variety introduced by King Louis XV of France you understand, they fit the classic swing line model that has been in use for darn near a century. There’s a small bungie chord and a few loose screws.
Well before we are accused of having a few screws loose—what’s missing from the list above? The missing “gem” is a reasonable assortment of paper clips. There is one. It has been straightened in order to slip one end into a small electronic device that has a reset button inside a small hole. But I’m afraid that’s it. There are 30 billion with a B manufactured and sold every year and only 1 ONE I SAY in my junk drawer! AND since once we get past a case (24) of something and sometimes only a six pack, common knowledge of what some number means gets a bit fuzzy. So let’s pause a moment shall we?
Thirty Billion 30,000,000,000 paper clips strung together would circle the Earth at the equator more than 20 times and possibly 25 times. You could string 30 billion paper clips together and circle the globe then go to the moon and back. Let’s not use the clips for that as we don’t want to encourage the idea of taking our red-tape and paperwork mountains off the planet.
Why is this object so much coveted? This object has served in four long-remembered functions that need highlighted here.
One of the objects in the junk drawer is my first harmonica. The story of it will appear in another place —you know objects in your life that have meaning show up in a bunch of places and in one end of that harmonica? You guessed it—a paper clip holds it together. How long has this been there? Well it allowed me to do a train whistle at least a decade before Steve Jobs showed us the texting phone calling music player some people have now.
On more than one occasion I’ve picked up any of several pairs of eye glasses only to come away with more than one piece in my hand only to find that a little screw has wandered off to the place where socks in your dryer and the right sized Tupperware lids hide. But instead of being more than a little screwed a paper clip slides into the small hole and with a quick little bend the ear piece is useable and off you go.
Missing a button in a not too obvious place? Bingo!
Finally…nearly all glue works so well that once you turn it upside down to get some on the surface you are hoping to hold together it clings to the glue container or creates a glue bubble. Well not if you stick a paper clip in the hole immediately after using the glue or to break through the glue bubble if you were not thinking about it at the time because it was super glue and your fingers are now sticking to each other.
It would be good to give credit to the inventor/designer of the clip that we use today and it would be great to credit the folks who invented the wheel and perhaps also assign some blame to the folks who thought neck ties were necessary at all let alone expected business wear. So we don’t really know. There were patented devices in the 1860s but the clip really didn’t get popular until the 1890s. There’s a big statue of the paper clip in Norway where the name of the clip is “gem” and of course that means credit is expected there, however the gem design is not the popular bent steel loop set we use. Before the paper in most the English speaking world red tape (yes that’s where the term comes from) was used to hold paper together.
Now the paper clip is the universal symbol indicating an additional self-contained file has been attached to a sent document such as an email. “Clippy” is the little Microsoft character that served as AI help within some of their most popular software offerings.
Well that brings us to the place where we try to pull all this together into something that makes sense to keep together. In our world today it seems like many people try to get the benefits of keeping people and thoughts apart. The paper clip has been a little warrior in the battle to keep things usable and together. It’s hard to measure how important keeping things together can be, however if you want to walk a mile in my shoes in order to understand some of the things that keep my thoughts together you can find out just how far you’ve walked by linking paper clips to each other and when you’ve reached 49,106 or so you’ve gone the extra mile and that my friend is greatly appreciated and will bring Peace and Joy to this here life. Bottom line it takes a lot of little things to keep your sh## together.
