The Pen and The Hole

It has been a most embarrassing week. I have been under the distinct impression that either I am hallucinating or that some kleptomaniacal soul is stalking me and stealing my pens. On Tuesday last, I had had to change my uniform shirt from my everyday short sleeve to my classy long sleeve in order to work a special event. Two pockets worth of papers, a notebook, a badge, a name tag, a whistle chain, a handcuff key, and a pen were all carefully transferred from one shirt to the other. I even injured myself trying to get the whistle chain off of the shoulder button. With everything safely tucked into my Class A long-sleeve shirt, away I went and worked my special event at the end of which I returned to the office to fill out paperwork only to find that my preferred writing utensil, a black PaperMate Profile 1.4B was missing from the specially designed pen-pocket on my left breast shirt pocket. I thought I must have just mislaid it, something that is an all-too-frequent occurrence. I took up a nearby thumb-click Bic pen and moved on with my life.

At home that night I changed shirts again. Again two pockets worth of papers, the notebook, the badge, the name tag, the whistle and chain, the handcuff key, and the . . . no not the pen. I stood in my bedroom for five full minutes looking for the Bic pen I had rightfully stolen from the office. I retraced my entire afternoon in my head. Filling out the event form; filling out the time sheet; filling out the report for the girl who had come in. Ah! the girl must have taken it. Clearly one thief is as forgetful as another and it is, after all, just a Bic pen. I scrounged around the room and took up another blue thumb-click Bic pen I must have stolen from the officer earlier and tucked it safely in the pocket.

Just hours later I drove to work again where no sooner had I clocked in than I was sent to assist an individual locked out of his own car. Having served several people with such assistance, I went through the routine of informing them I was not a professional locksmith and could not guarantee that by breaking into their vehicle for them I would not damage the inner workings of the car’s mechanisms. The jovial and incessantly chattering youth understood and agreed to sign the waiver I handed to him. But then he asked for a pen. I hardly need mention my annoyance at reaching up and feeling emptiness where my own stylus is supposedly stored. It was inexplicable. I hadn’t had time to lose another pen! All I did was drive to work! I begged a pen off my partner, broke into the car, waved away the exuberant thanks of the jabbering student, and drove off stewing over having lost three pens in as many hours.

In the office again I acquired a cap-top pen, which disappeared before the night was through. I unearthed yet another cap-top pen from a drawer and not only secured it in my pen-pocket but checked on it regularly almost every ten minutes as I walked around. But then I was called to assist so-and-so with thus-and-such and had no sooner arrived on scene and needed the man to fill out a statement form when the pen disappeared yet again. I needn’t weary you with an account of every time my pen went missing. In four days I lost in quick succession, three thumb-clicks, two PaperMate Profiles, seven cap-tops, two Hi-Tecs, a Pilot, and four Bics. Every one simply wasn’t there when it had been mere moments before.

I was desperately clinging to my last hope in a black ballpoint (and a blue gel secretly stowed in a back pocket) when I clocked off work an hour later than my usual two in the morning. I was congratulating myself on having successfully maintained not just one but two pens the entire shift as I climbed into my car to drive home. I tossed my bag into the back seat and started up the car. As I pulled my seat belt across my torso my hand hit against something hard attached to the shoulder strap. I fumbled for a moment trying to untangle the object from where it was catching in the space between the buttons on my shirt. In a single moment life was superbly clear, and I felt superbly ridiculous. There in my car, attached to my seat belt by the same clip all pens use to attach to a shirt pocket, was my friend the black PaperMate Profile 1.4B. The seat belt rides across my chest at the exactly perfect angle to slide beneath the outer clip of the pen and as I unbelt, away goes the pen. I found, when I got out, the entire accumulation of wayward writing utensils congregated in a pile in the crack between the door jamb and the seat’s side. That and three pairs of sunglasses.