Don’t you marvel at engineers who come up with better designs for the stuff we use every day? I mean, whoever created Glide floss should be knighted as far as I’m concerned. That goes for office supplies too. In particular, I’m talking about the Staples One-Touch 3-hole punch.

This is my story…

While I hesitate to admit this to you (because we hardly know each other), I am an incompetent at punching holes. Inevitably, what happens is this: I become overly ambitious with my dreams of workplace organization. That means I sit down with a stack of papers that all need to go into a newly labeled 3-ring binder. Thus begins the chore of punching holes in all of those documents. But I usually grab too many sheets and the puncher has dull blades, so some of the sheets go sideways in the puncher in my struggle to punch them, and the holes sometimes end up halfway off the sheet, which means they’re not really holes so much as crescent moons. So I grab my single-hole puncher to remedy the situation, but I can never line up the missing hole with the other holes on the sheet and, therefore, many sheets end up not really suitable to fit uniformly in my 3-ring binder. So goes another effort at personal improvement.

Apparently, the designers at Staples have experienced similar office gaffes, and they have come up with a puncher that takes — according to their calculations — 50% less effort than the standard puncher. (If they had measured it against my puncher, the ratio would have been much higher, but I digress.) This monster can handle up to 20 sheets at a time. And the compartment where the detritus accumulates isn’t a funky piece of plastic that, when you peel it back, sprays your office floor with confetti.

What next? Self-cleaning microwave ovens? Now is truly a majestic time to be alive.

Posted on January 9th, 2008 by dian