SPACE PEN: Put Down The Probe

When you work for a living and it doesn’t matter what you happen to work at, there are specific challenges related to that job. Sometimes the biggest challenge is dealing with your co-workers and the customers. It is those smaller, technical challenges that you can often spend years thinking about and trying to solve. Often there is no easy fix so you just give up and suck it up. Sometimes, there is a solution.

 

When I delivered mail, the weather often posed the biggest challenge. Thankfully, the Post Office wardrobe department provided us with semi yearly “issue” of clothing that covered everything from drenching downpours to minus 40°C. The only thing they couldn’t do is to provide clothing that gave the naked feel in very hot summer weather. I am sure there were some carriers that took matters into their own hands and did naked until the police came for them. Not me!

 

One of my bug-a-boos was that in very, very cold weather my pens would freeze and I had to ask the people not only to sign for their Registered mail, but to also provide a pen to do it with. Often this was no problem, but sometimes the person would disappear into the house for what seemed like hours while you stood on the stoop in the freezing cold. How could someone not have a pen that is easy to find? After a (long) while they would come back with a pencil and I would have to tell them that it had to be signed in ink and that ink should be black because the Post Office scanners didn’t scan blue ink very well. Of course this developed into a discussion of the inner workings of the Post Office and how I did not make policy I just did as I was told. Often I would end by telling them that although they couldn’t sign for the letter in pencil, I could write a card for them to pick it up at the sub Post Office the next day. That never went over well.

 

This went on for years and poor Louise had to listen to me whine not only about the weather but how I couldn’t get a signature. One year for my birthday or Christmas, Louise bought me a Fisher Space Pen! This marvelous pen would write upside down, on greasy paper, on wet paper and in -40°C temperatures. I loved that pen! I just had to remember to get it back from the customer after he/she signed for the registered letter. It also came in black and till the day I retired I didn’t have that problem again.

 

A few months ago I began to think about that space pen and wondered what it had been doing since retirement. I started looking in my desk drawer to see how it was doing, but no space pen. I looked in the kitchen where we have a tiny bucket filled with pens. No space pen. Over the next few months I looked in every drawer in the house, every pocket in every jacket I own, the postal uniforms that I still have and in the garage. The pen might have found it’s way into a car. No space pen.

 

I have several coffee cans filled with pens because I just can’t resist buying baggies of pens at the second hand store. I knew that the space pen wouldn’t be in any of those cans because my pen fixation came long after I left the Post Office, but I had to look. I am still looking for it from time to time but so far no luck.

 

I did find the refill that came with the original pen, but because it has an innovative design you just can’t slot it into any ball point pen housing. However, it turns out that the refill came with an adapter so that it would fit a Parker Pen. I was sure that in all of those drawers, coat pockets, automobiles and coffee cans I would have a Parker Pen. Out of perhaps a thousand pens I did have one Parker Pen which I put the refill in and labeled it as a Space Pen so that it wouldn’t get misplaced or tossed out.

 

I don’t have a use for the Space Pen any longer and I have pens that I like much more for writing. I don’t have any other pen that I spent so much of my retirement trying to find so in a way it is precious to me. It sits to the left of my keyboard and well, it just sits. There may come a time when I will be abducted by aliens and if I am allowed the time to fetch my Space Pen I will be able to leave Louise a note telling her where I have gone even if I am upside down writing on greasy, wet paper in -40°C weather. I hope this marvelous pen will convince the aliens to put down the probe.