Week 3 - Wednesday
'Love and Staple-Guns.' What a great title for a film. I would watch it,
anyway.
What a lovely thing is a stapler! They do make me happy. Such a perfect
piece of design - you wish, do you, to join together two things which were
not previously joined? Voila, one almost sexually satisfying squeeze and it
is so. I know that somewhere some evil modernist is already at work to
eradicate them and replace them with something horrid and electronic which
will bore you shitless and not work at all and require three weeks of
night-school to master. Or like some genetically engineered animal with
staples for teeth, a little modified hedgehog or possum or something which
will just crawl around your desk biting things that need stapling, and
shitting Tippex over anything that needs correcting. That would be cute
actually. But they will have to prise my staple-gun from my cold dead hand.
You have all watched Office
Space, I hope. I would definitely do what the Milton character in that
does if someone threatened my stapler.
I think I must celebrate the man who invented the stapler. At school we had
this box full of cards dramatising or giving potted resumes of the lives of
various great inventors and innovators, Edison and Stephenson and Jethro
Tull or whoever, and you would read them and answer little questions based
on the text. The man who gave the world the stapler should definitely have
been there.
Austria, Winter 1848
Two lonely figures trudged across a snowy wilderness towards a small town on
the banks of the Danube, huddling together for warmth as an icy wind howled
around them.
'God grant we may be in time,' the taller figure, a woman, muttered as they
staggered exhaustedly onto the bridge leading to the town fort. With one
hand she held her companion, a boy - lean and malnourished yet with a
certain unmistakable nobility in his features. The other was clenched
tightly around the thing she had not let go of these many days - a thing she
had raised to her lips to kiss on more than one occasion during their lonely
trek.
On the other side of the bridge the woman struggled the last few feet
through the wind and the snow and banged on the door of the fortress with
the last of her strength. An impressive-looking captain answered it and
looked at her grandly down his moustaches.
'My name is Magdalena Staple,' the woman panted. 'This is my young son, Karl
Johann. You hold my husband inside on suspicion of revolutionary activities.
He is to be shot tonight. But he has been proved innocent! I bring the
pardon from Vienna!'
Triumphantly, she raised up the papers in her right hand and passed them to
the soldier, who fought back a tear at the sight of the two tattered figures
and the thought of his own wife and child.
Yet the bureaucracy of the Habsburg Empire was inflexible and merciless.
'I am sorry,' he said. 'The pardon must be signed in triplicate. But there
are only two copies here!'
The woman looked in disbelief. There had been three copies of the pardon
when they set out from Vienna!
'Mutti - look!'
Then she saw. Within the last few faltering paces the third piece of paper
had slipped from her treacherous grasp. It lay now scant yards behind them,
fluttering poignantly on the bridge. As she watched in horror the wind
whipped it about and picked it up...
'No!'
She dashed towards it but the cruel wind blew the life-saving document
further from her. Despairingly, she clawed after it. Suddenly a particularly
savage gust of wind blew her off the bridge and into the icy river. The
paper floated longer than she did.
'Mutti!'
Sadly the captain shook his head and patted the horrified young lad on the
shoulder. 'Ah, me. If only those three pieces of paper had been securely
joined together this would not have happened. Now I must go in and shoot
your father.'
Because of a stray piece of paper Karl Johann Staple was alone in the world,
an orphan twice over.
Karl Johann never forgot...grew to manhood obsessed with finding ways to
join pieces of paper to other pieces of paper and keep them joined...early
experiments with fuck-off big nailguns, wounded himself in many terrible
ways... diligence, perseverance...years of patiently endured poverty...
Sabotage and assassination attempts by agents of his rival, Friedrich
Paperklipp...yes, yes, I see it all...