The Saga of The Red Swingline Stapler

...just another humorous pick me up posts

Just about anyone whom has ever watched Office Space knows of the character, Milton and his absolute obsession with his red Swingline Stapler. In fact, that McGuffin became a sought-after bit of memorabilia. In fact, it was some other stapler, painted to look like a red Swingline. Swingline didn’t even make a red stapler then.

Until this one. Swingline literally made a fire-engine red stapler and it looks just like this.

Fun Fact: This one is mine. I’ve had it for well over twenty years now. It also has a story behind it. One that will probably shock and horrify you or it will make you laugh. Those are completely on you. I bear no responsibility for how you perceive me after I tell you this story.

Dialing it back to 2006 or so, when I wasn’t at work at the prison pulling night shift, I was at home, doing internet radio.

On the radio station’s message board was an announcement. The station’s owner had a friend and that friend had listed a red Swingline stapler and he linked back to the listing on ebay. It was an auction. This too had a story and it goes a little something like this.

The lister, we’ll call him Jack was listing this red Swingline stapler, a visor and some random object from a co-worker, we’ll call him Vince because it was the ultimate prank. Jack was constantly borrowing Vince’s stapler. Borrow being a very loose term here. Then he’d watch as Vince would return to his desk, search, go red in the face and then erupt with “Who Has My Stapler!”

Jack would return, handing the stapler back, singing it’s praises and being completely apologetic for not getting it back to him sooner but thanking him and really being nice about the rather dickish move he’d pulled.

This time, Jack wanted to get Vince but good.

The auction would also include a video of Vince’s reaction when he found out that his beloved stapler had been auctioned off.

There was an absolute petty-ass bidding war between all of us at the station. I had to get to work but I had a plan. You could probably buy one of these things off of some office supply store. I checked around, saw a few prices and set my max bid at ten bucks over that. If my theory was correct, the closer it got to MSRP, the safer I was.

The bidding ended. I was at work but my max actually worked. The price fell just a couple dollars short of MSRP so that’s what I paid.

I got to talk to Jack. He was a hysterical guy. I got stories of the office floor that he managed. We talked about a ton of different things and then, the day arrived and so did the stapler. The visor was there, so was the random object, an old-school printer cable.

When I finally got to see Vince get the big reveal, I couldn’t stop laughing. He was absolutely livid. I thought he was going to rip Jack’s soul out of him.

And here it is. This stapler started up north. It worked in an office building, a cube farm similar to that of the ones seen in Office Space. Just after I got this stapler, I had upgraded my phone to a Motorola RAZR V3r which was the exact same shade of red.

After living on my desk in my house for a couple of years, stapling all manner of documents, in the swamps of Louisiana, it moved back up north with me. It’s live both on my desk and inside my desk drawer. It’s a little dusty, I typically don’t staple many things anymore but it’s one of those objects that I happen to possess that, when the subject of red Swingline staplers is ever brought up, I can tell them that they do, in fact exist but not the way the movie depicted them.

As a matter of fact, the damned thing can be used in a defensive capacity due largely to being built like a friggin’ tank. Don’t get it twisted, this is some tank-armor-level construction. One smack upside the head with one of these will absolutely push your shit in and make it scared to ever come out. Fucker’s built to outlive me and will probably go on to staple the documents of generations after me.

The Stapler Is Time Immortal, Itself!