Yet that means that one gets insanely particular about what kind of pens and calculators one uses. I have had the same calculator at three different workplaces and it has survived since last century with the same battery. It can only perform the most basic of operations and the most sophisticated thing that it can do is store one number to memory.
This brings me to the most particular and mundane of tools that anyone ever is likely to talk about; that is namely my pen and I am very particular about which pen is my preferred weapon of choice.
The Staedtler Stick 430M.
I bet that billions of these have been sold by now. The reason for this is that they are the best.
Firstly that the ball in the ball point doesn't scrape the paper as it is going along and that means that you don't get microfibres of paper in the point. The point of the 430M is not as fine as the 430F and so you get a thicker line. This means that even among different models from the same company, I have preferences.
Very fine ball point pens have an annoying habit of getting clogged up but not the 430M because its broader point allows the ball to go over the microbumps. It is like if you fitted nice big and wide chunky tyres to a car and then ran lower air pressure. You are more likely to bounce over the top of bumps and drive across sand and dirt, than if you had narrow tyres which cut the surface of the road.
Secondly the barrel of the pen is hexagon shaped. Unlike the Kilometrico by PaperMate, the Staedtler Stick 430M is not going to roll away from you on thee table; it is also not going to roll off of the table and onto the floor. Now while that seems like a microproblem, just remember that we are talking about a pen of all things.
Thirdly the weight and feel of the pen to hand, is excellent. I am sure that the people at Staedtler would have obsessively engineered every detail of this. Yes a Bic Crystal is also a hexagonal barreled pen but yet it somehow manages to feel both too light and too wavy. The 430M has the same sort of feel as the perfect cricket bat; which I am assuming is because the weight is perfectly balanced around the actual point of rotation of the pen as opposed to exactly half way.
Fourthly the ink in the Staedtler 430M is also just about perfect. I imagine that n order to work properly inside a ball point pen, that the ink has to be matched with mechanism, in details like viscosity etc. The ink doesn't tend to smudge and nor does it form little clumps. I have a range of colours such as black, blue and red (which I can't really tell from green) and they always work properly but the colours which I hardly ever use like green and purple, also work perfectly every time. I do not remember the last time that I bought a purple pen but I have the confidence that my purple 430M which is probably more than five years old, will work perfectly every time.
And that's just it, isn't it? Long ago in the 1960s and before IBM adopted its single word slogan of "Think!", they had the previous slogan of "Machines should work; people should think." Now that while that does imply that people shouldn't be mindless dolts, it also implies that when you buy a thing and expect it to work, it should work. Mr Winchester of the eponymous rifle and gun company is supposed to have said that "a gun which does not shoot is merely a stick". We expect that if we buy a thing that it will do the job that it is intended to do and if it fails at its only purpose, then it has failed. A pen which doesn't work is like a broken pencil: it is pointless.
As someone who's job it is to wrangle numbers, to round them up and to drive them into boxes, then unlike someone who works in a highly charismatic trade I do not have highly charismatic tools of trade. Nevertheless, I still appreciate the tools that I do have and when I find a good one, I uncharismatically stick to it.
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