School Supplies
Extravaganza
Submitted by
KC
626 words (4-4.5 minutes)
| I was walking through Staples the other day. School was just around
the weekend corner and I needed school supplies. The usual school
supplies were needed, a blue/black pen, a ruler, a pencil, a binder,
binder paper, eraser, and a backpack. I went in, thinking it would
only take me 10 minutes tops to get my supplies. I picked up a basket
and walked down one of the aisles. It was the pencil/pen aisle. I
needed one red pen, one blue pen and one black pen. I stood there for
5 minutes exactly, staring. They have 20 different pens. They have
your assorted colors. Your medium or light or dark write. They have
ballpoint and fountain and a hybrid. They have gel, ink. They have
pens that have 3 pens in one! I stood there for a good 5 minutes
trying to figure out which would be best for me. I grabbed a package,
where the pen tubes were blue black and red, assuming that the ink
would be the same as the tubes. I got home, and they were all pink.
After that, I got to the pencil section of the aisle. I stood there
for 10 minutes this time. They had mechanical pencils, wooden pencils,
lead pencils, and granite pencils, pencils where you just kept writing
and didn't even have to do anything to reload the lead. I began to
start thinking, if they had just ONE or TWO of each item, life for me
wouldn't be so goddamn difficult. I continued to stare, wondering if I should get a mechanical pencil, but then I would have to worry about what kind of lead I was to buy. If it were .5 or .7 or .9 or if I wanted a hybrid kind of led that wrote dark. So I decided, well, it would be a lot easier to buy just a plain wooden pencil. They had their own little section. There were 10 different types, from different companies, that had different types of wood and different writing ways. They had different erasers. I started to whimper. I just picked a random pack of pencils using my reliable "enie meanie miney mo" method. When I had got home, they hardly even wrote. They were a special drawing pencil. After I had gotten my pencils and my pens, I trudged my sorrowful self down to the ruler aisle. I figured that there wouldn't be that much of a selection because a ruler was a ruler. As I approached the section, there were 45* angle rules, 90* angle rules, rulers that were 13 inches long and rulers that were 15 inches long. There were different colors and there were wood rulers, metal rulers, and plastic rulers. I began to get into a fit, and just told my dad to pick one. He chose a simple wooden ruler. Turns out I need something called a scale rule, a ruler that was three in one. I was beginning to get a little bit peevish, and walked down to the backpack aisle. Again I figured, well, it's a backpack. There has to be a plain black one sans the fancy pockets and glow in the dark stripes. I was wrong. There were colors up the wazoo, and pockets galore. But NO PLAIN BLACK PACKPACK. I got into this raging fit. If there were one of everything, everyone would be forced to just get that one thing and there wouldn't be such a goddamned hassel. I can just think of the millions of people who walk into their Staples or Office Maxes and say to them selves, " I'm only going to take 15 minutes in here, just to get a few things for work." Those poor, unsuspecting people… |