i believe you have my stapler

I love the movie Office Space. I first stumbled across it in college where it had achieved the status of a cult-classic. I could always find someone to borrow the movie from and people even incorporated scenes into class presentations. Blindly, I praised the cleverness of director/ writer Mike Judge for emphasizing all of the annoyances of life in the working world.

Flash forward to the present. I am now out of school and have spent a few years in the real world. Though my love for the movie has not change, my appreciation of it has. To my surprise, the movie was not exaggerated at all. Sure, I have never assaulted a fax machine with a baseball bat, but the daydream has popped into my head. In college I had thought that the environment in which the movie was set in was just an accumulation of every office stereo-type that existed. Now, I realize just how accurate the work place was portrayed.

I tried for the longest time to ignore all of the similarities that my office shared with the movie: the cubicle farm, Hawaiian shirt Friday, the office gossipers. Maybe I wanted to believe that what I did for a living was more exciting than filing TPS reports all day. Eventually, reality caught up with me. It occurred on a typical day...

I was busy being a desk-jockey, pushing papers around from one folder to another. But, I was having a terrible time with my stapler. On average it took five attempts to get just one staple through a stack of seven to eight pages. Each time the stapler failed I became more frustrated. After an hour of this, the frustration became too much and I snapped. Now, I am not 100% sure what happened, since I blacked out, but I do remember repeatedly slamming the stapler with my fist. I guess I figured if I could just hit the damn thing hard enough that the staple would make it through the paper. I was wrong. When I regained consciousness, I had succeeded in joining only the first and second pages together, plus I had wasted an entire clip of staples on one file. I must have made quite a commotion because all of my co-workers were nervously peering at me from behind the safety of their cubes. Everyone's eyes were saying the same thing: "I hope he doesn't hurl that stapler my way." To ease the awkwardness of the situation I responded to the stares by saying "Out of staples," and shrugged my shoulders in confusion like I could not figure out where all of the noise had come from either.

I b-lined it to the office supply room. My safe haven for the time being. I could pretend like I was looking for a new box of staples even though I was just looking to hide from the curious eye of my co-workers. Surely by now the rumors of my meltdown had spread all the way to top management. It was only a matter of time before the "nice men" came by with a pretty white jacket to take me to the loony-bin. So, I stood in the supply room waiting for something to happen. But nothing did. After a few minutes had passed, I grew calm and my senses began to adjust to my surroundings. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a small glowing object resting in the corner cabinet on the second shelf from the bottom. I was intrigued. What could this glorious treasure be? I inched closer and knelt down to have a look. My hand reached out to touch the rectangular cardboard box that had drawn me in. As I lifted the box from the shelf the fluorescent lights fixated a spot light on me, and in the background a choir of angels began to sing. I slowly opened the box and removed the object. The angels began to sing louder and in an increased octave. It was pure beauty. It was God sent. It was...A new stapler! I quickly pinched myself to make sure I was not hallucinating. I was not.

Now the only problem was getting back to my desk without anyone noticing the holy grail of staplers that I had just discovered. The last thing I want to do is flaunt my new prized possession and incite the desire in my co-workers to rob me blind when I am not around. So, I placed the stapler in my pocket and disguised the lump by carrying a folder over my leg. I put my head down and headed strait towards my desk. "Walk with a purpose. Walk with a purpose," I kept telling myself. Trying hard to avoid any eye-contact. I ran past the gauntlet of questions which assaulted me from every cube I passed. I made sure to quickly give only a yes or no answer.

Once back at my desk I loaded the new stapler with a clip of fresh staples and pulled all of the dead staples out the file that had caused me so much frustration. With a gentle tap I activate the stapler. It functioned with the precision of a Swiss time piece. I reclined back into my chair and smiled from ear to ear. One staple! One staple! Finally a stapler that actually works!

After a few minutes, I drifted back to earth from cloud nine. As I did so it occurred to me how pathetic I was for getting genuinely excited over a stapler. If this was the highlight of my day at work then I truly do live in the real world version of Office Space.