Minying sent me some very amusing links today, one of which is called Tomato Nation. Check this out:

"I have also seen data to suggest that many office supplies suffer from depression. My Cross pen sets, for example. The average Cross pen set has dangerously low self-esteem, because it knows that it is kind of a lame gift and that it is the rare recent graduate indeed who will actually find use for a mechanical pencil. It is shiny and comes with a leather case, and yet it languishes unused, hating itself, and when its big moment finally arrives -- when I decide that, as a grown woman, the time has come to wean myself from pens with heads on them -- it won't write at all. Its ink has dried up. It has lost the ability to love.

Other pens deal with their depression via passive-aggressive behavior. The fountain pen is a perfect example. It pretends that the cartridges I bought will fit, and then they don't. I exchange the cartridges for the correct size, and then the fountain pen refuses to let me unscrew it. Then the cartridge breaks and stains my shirt, I get upset, the fountain pen starts crying…it's just not a constructive way to deal with problems, and yet I try to work it out with the fountain pen periodically, because I bought the damn thing, and I bought the cartridges (…twice), and I bought the clever little chamois blotting rag, and dammit, a fountain pen is sophisticated, right? Well, sophisticated, yes. Mature? In touch with its anger in a positive way? No."

Heh.