When I was a kid, everyone carried a pencil. Regular old wood pencil, dropped in a pocket or purse. There wasn't any good ball point pens back then, and what there was, skipped, wrote terrible, and sometimes left a big blue stain on your shirt. Then came Bic.
Nowadays, nobody carries a pencil anymore, and ball point pens have come so far that you find them just laying around in alleys. I've found Bic pens, Papermate stick pens, a couple of Pilot G2 gel pens. The Papermate was laying half buried in a muddy path, and on pulling it out, wiping it off with a bit of crumpled up paper towel, it wrote just fine. The other day walking out of the grocery store, laying there on the asphalt was a black Pilot G2, about half the ink still on board, and its now in the glove box of my car. It writes just fine. Weird. It appears that ball point pen technology has reached a point that they all work sooo damm well, that its made pencils obsolete. Now, restaurants, dry cleaners, big box stores, all have cheap stick pens for the customer to sign the credit card bill with. Can't recall the last time I saw a pencil being used anywhere.
Nowadays, nobody carries a pencil anymore, and ball point pens have come so far that you find them just laying around in alleys. I've found Bic pens, Papermate stick pens, a couple of Pilot G2 gel pens. The Papermate was laying half buried in a muddy path, and on pulling it out, wiping it off with a bit of crumpled up paper towel, it wrote just fine. The other day walking out of the grocery store, laying there on the asphalt was a black Pilot G2, about half the ink still on board, and its now in the glove box of my car. It writes just fine. Weird. It appears that ball point pen technology has reached a point that they all work sooo damm well, that its made pencils obsolete. Now, restaurants, dry cleaners, big box stores, all have cheap stick pens for the customer to sign the credit card bill with. Can't recall the last time I saw a pencil being used anywhere.
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