Which would you choose?
Cllr Ron Ronnson has attempted to justify to a committee why the local council spent £35k on a stapler expert last year.
Julia Evans is regarded as the country’s leading stationery expert, and has done some ground-breaking work in the area of staplers. What’s more, she claims to have ‘cracked the staple code’. Incredibly, she says she can tell a strip of No.10s from a rogue pair of 26/6s.
“Until quite recently, people in offices assumed the numbers written on the boxes of staples were entirely random”, explained Evans. “But thanks to my team of dedicated research fellows, we think we’re on the verge of understanding them.”
Evans believes that there are three distinct genus of staple, each divided into a number of sub-species. “They don’t interact very well, in fact they barely get on”, she explained. “Choosing the wrong breed of staple can quickly kill even the healthiest of staplers.”
Ron Ronnson has seen the council stationery budget soar out of control in recent years, as people took to throwing their staplers away as soon as they were empty.
“That wasn’t sustainable, so I thought we’d get someone in”, he boomed. “Now there’s no excuse for trying to shove a load of Rapesco Heavies up a low-penetration Rexel.”
Council members now know their way round a Ryman, and can quickly work out what length of staple to use for 43 sheets of 180 GSM foolscap. Official papers have never been so efficiently attached to each other, and Ronnson thinks £35k was ‘a small price to pay’.
“It’s been a roaring success, I hope we can extend Julia’s remit”, said Ronnson. “The stationery cupboard still has a lot of secrets to give up, such as ‘what’s that green string with metal bits on for?’, ‘what’s the best colour of post-it note?’ and ‘why the f*** are we still ordering Tippex?'”
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