It’s Fill Your Stapler Day
Did you know it’s Fill Your Stapler Day? Today’s the day to check that your #staplers are well fed and that you’re stocked up on #staple supplies for the future.
What will happen if you don’t stock up or you buy the wrong sort of stapler? We’ve written a couple of #shortstories (and a #poem!) to give you a glimpse into the future. (Bonus points if you can find the links to staplers we’ve scattered throughout the blog.)
Patch me through
The Prime Minister strode down the hallway. Her team of scientists and soldiers had been communicating with the aliens for five years now, preparing for this moment: she would be the first human to meet an alien species in person.
At first, the government was concerned that they might be aggressive. It turned out to be quite the opposite – the aliens considered themselves the galaxy’s greatest lovers and lotharios. (Though the Prime Minister wondered how, shall we say, successful, a three-foot tall, furry, marshallow-coloured alien could be.)
She’d had to repeatedly decline their offers of having a more personal ‘first contact‘ and that’s why she was wearing the most sombre trouser suit she could. She looked positively funereal.
As she sped down the bunker’s corridor to the landing pad, the PM’s trouser pocket snagged on one of the ceremonial swords belonging to the guardians lining her route.
Rrriiippp.
There was no time. No time. Here she was, about to welcome an alien being to earth and her damn trousers had ripped. One of her aides hurried to her and improvised with what was to hand – a stapler. The PM grabbed a grey shawl from one of her party and tossed it over her shoulder to hide the rudimentary fix.
She would have to conduct the meeting wearing hastily-mended trousers and, as she noticed when she walked, stapled knickers to boot. But this is what humans did. They adapted and survived. The whole repair had taken 15 seconds. She counted.
A moment later she was on the landing pad, facing the alien craft. It looked… soft. A bit like a brioche bun she’d had for breakfast last week.
Focus.
Just like in the movies, there was a crack of light as the ship’s door opened. But not like in the movies, a little alien waddled out, huffing and puffing as if it had been running for a bus.
As the Prime Minister stepped forward to shake hands (or, in its case, flippers), her heel caught the bottom of her now slightly slacker trouser leg. There was a tearing sound and a few ‘pings’ of metal hitting the floor.
Slowly, but absolutely unstoppably, her trouser leg started to fall from her thigh, over her knee, past her calf and landed in a heap around her left ankle.
The little marshmallow alien started to grin and waggled its furry eyebrows ‘seductively’.
Maybe his charm had worked after all.
Child’s Play
“Simkins, for this deal to go ahead we have to observe strict protocol.”
‘Daddy, give me the stapler,’ Jemima loved to play with the family’s stapler. It lived on the kitchen table with her art supplies. Her arms weren’t quite long enough to reach it.
At five years old she was already ordering her dad about, though she was hard to take seriously in her star-shaped sunglasses (from Blackpool Pier) and a far-too-big floppy hat that made her look like a chubby flower (from mummy’s wardrobe).
The stapler was brightly coloured and, best of all, transparent. Jemima loved to watch the little motor and gears turning – maybe she’d grow up to be an engineer.
“The client won’t sign any deal unless it’s been stapled using his favourite stapler. To show diligence and deference, we have to protect it for him. I’m giving it to you for safekeeping. Take it home. Look after it like it’s worth a million pounds. Which it is.”
The stapler was thin and black. Efficient. All business. Like the client.
“DADDY!” Jemima Simkins’ dad, Luke, was distracted. He had to deal with his lovely, but very demanding daughter and to finish the paperwork for the deal that would seal his promotion.
Things were getting messy.
Somehow his work and her drawings and her teddies and her trinkets and her crayons and her everything else had got muddled up on the kitchen table.
Thinking of other things, he reached under the pile of papers and handed the stapler to her. He’d be working late tonight and would have to clear up everything in the morning before he went to the office.
“We’re ready to sign the papers now, sir. Here’s our VP of marketing, Luke Simkins. He will present you with your stapler, which you entrusted to our safekeeping. Luke?”
Jemima didn’t mind the stapler her daddy had handed her last night, but it was a bit booring. It was thin and black.
What happened to her colourful one?
The World’s Best Surgeon
The world’s best surgeon
Is an older man
He went to the best schools
At a prodigiously young age
He commands respect
Where he treads
Bowed deference
To scalpel and skill
But the world’s best surgeon
Has a problem
That his nurses
Have to keep secret
He’s forget
ful.
Every third operation
(Or so they gossip)
In their blues
and Crocs
He leaves a stapler
In a patient
Slip! Gone
Stitched.
So his nurses, bless them
Keep a cupboard stocked
With staples and staplers
To keep replacing
The ones that were sown up.
But they never tell the boss
It would be an embarrassment
After all
He’s the world’s best surgeon.
Can you think of any stapler disasters of your own? (Though hopefully nothing as bad as getting flirty with an alien.) Let us know what they are in the comments, of course, remember to stock up on staples and staplers.