The Long Reach Stapler

06/05/2024

Do you ever need to look something up online, but you don't have even the faintest idea what to call it? This has happened to me twice recently. I'm notoriously bad at word recall–more so since the arrival of The Child and corresponding departure of Anywhere Near Enough Sleep To Support Average Brain Function–and this sometimes makes Googling into a frustrating flail in the dark abyss of language. The first recent example is when I was editing my school's annual staff music video. I wanted a moon to slide onto the screen to the sound of… well… what is that sound? I tried to ask my students: "You know, that one that happens in space, but it's music, and it goes dum, dum, dum…. DA DAAAA!" My students were no help– unless you count scathingly judgmental side-eye as help– so I turned to the Internet. But what the heck do you call that sound? It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out I was thinking of the iconic music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Another recent example: I am the advisor for our school's student literary magazine. After a semester of cajoling submissions out of introverted teens, organizing poems and stories and plays, wedging in various pieces of artwork and sweating through the formatting process, we had a beautiful product and one seemingly insurmountable problem: we didn't have a stapler capable of putting two staples in the middle of a center-folded booklet.

"I know such a machine exists," I insisted. My dubious editors scattered about the school in search of the device. They returned with various prizes: A massive stapler strong enough to pierce through a whole novel. A staple-gun style instrument that they immediately misused in predictable ways. Hoards of normal staplers. But no stapler capable of binding our journals.

"We can just use yarn to sew a binding?" One industrious editor suggested. Cute idea, I replied, that would be great if we had infinite time to prepare these journals! I composed an email plea to my colleagues, but when the moment came, I couldn't name the thing I was looking for. A long stapler? A stapler-that-can-staple-in-the-middle-of-a-big-piece-of-paper,-but-not-like-what -you're-thinking? I tried Googling it. "Stapler for big paper" didn't work. "Long stapler" wasn't effective. Finally, I tried "Long-jawed stapler." Ultimately, the personification did the trick. An image came up. I sent the picture to my colleagues. But somehow, in a combined middle and high school, a building full of teachers with weird paper-based projects, no one seemed to have the thing I was looking for.

I resorted to the mecca of staple-related products: Staples.

Finally– The tool I had been fumbling to name was on clearance, tucked away on a bottom shelf in a surprisingly small stapler section: The Long-Reach Stapler.

What a pain it is to have a basic task that simply isn't possible without a very specific tool, and what a joy to finally have that tool at your disposal! Now that is one cool thing!

Ellen Parent - Writer & Teacher
All rights reserved 2021
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