Office Max!

You will find that even bills that can fluctuate on a monthly basis, such as telephone bills or office supplies, have a monthly average.

Professor Jurilla in her talk on the history of the book in the Philippines devoted a portion of the lecture on the rise of retail bookstores in the Philippines, which is actually a pretty late development. National Bookstore and Goodwill Bookstore were both founded in the 1930’s (in fact, Goodwill is celebrating their 70th Anniversary next year) by the same family, but due to the nature of publishing trends–specifically literary publishing trends–in the Philippines at that period, they behaved more like stationers rather than booksellers though they did carry books in their respective inventories. However, it would seem that National Bookstore concentrated on selling school and office supplies first and foremost in order to be able to support bookselling, and not the other way around, while Goodwill eventually became known for being a textbook seller.

I went in a bit early to pick up my last Santa check from Macy’s, run into Midtown Comics, deposit said check at the bank, stop by Staples to pick up, what else, office supplies and then to Borders to return a few things I got for Christmas.

I like Wordpress. I like having my little blog and setting out how I like, talking about whatever I like and making my own little website. Myspace seems a bit proscriptive to me - sure you can change the wallpaper and shuffle things around, but it’s still a myspace page like all the others. Wordpress is no different, but it just feels better to me. I just don’t like the look of Myspace. Also, it doesn’t work that well with Safari, which is a bit of a pain in the ass for me, since I use Safari for everything, pretty much. Maybe I should forget about myspace and get iLife instead. But then I would have to change my url again! Oh, it’s all so confusing!! Somedays don’t you just long for good old pen and paper!?

“The nation’s most trusted consumer electronics specialty retailer of wireless communications, electronic parts, batteries, accessories” Gee, wonder who that could be? Hey, it’s RadioShack! (their web descriptor). Yes, the same company that just laid off over 400 people via e-mail. Hope they’re not wondering why so many office supplies (and notebook computers and electronic parts) seem to be – um – disappearing. Or, why customer service is really getting bad.

This is Mr. Bojangles. He's a pencil holder that I made waaaaaay back in my 5th grade art class. Why did I make a creepy looking pencil holder out of clay? Beats me, but I still have it over 25 years later. Mr. Bojangles is my oldest remaing possession.

You can’t see me right now - because my digital camera and computer are no longer on speaking terms - but I look very fetching. I’m wearing my new reading glasses. Jean badgered me into getting them yesterday. We were trolling through Staples Office Supply MegaSuperWonderstore, on the hunt for new pens, when I complained about a sudden onslaught of sleepiness. She stopped, looked at me, and laid down a declaration.

Franchisors like Cartridge World, Rapid Refill, Smart Cartridge, and Caboodle Cartridge will argue that market acceptance of off-brand quality inks is rapidly increasing, providing ample room for aggressive franchisees to capture a piece of this growing market share. While it is true that market acceptance is increasing, so are the alternatives. Office Depot, Staples, Office Max, and nearly all retail stores now offer generic or private labeled inks and cartridges at substantially lower prices than their name-brand counterparts (HP, Canon, Lexmark, etc.).

From the Mayo Clinic: "Never attempt to dig out excessive or hardened earwax with items such as a paper clip, a cotton swab or a hairpin. You may push the wax farther into your ear and cause serious damage to the lining of your ear canal and even to your eardrum." Wanna go deaf? Stick a bobby pin in your ear. See herefor what it looks like when you've been packing that stuff in for a while.

Shopping for school supplies. (I’m still a sucker for office supplies, what can I say. Love those multi-colored Post Its.)

I’m a midget, by the way. All the other pencils in the drawer I call home are like eighteen centimeters tall. I’m only four centimeters tall, just four. I haven’t been used in years. You could say I am kind of a waste of space. Of course, all my friends keep getting taken to be used. One by one I get brand new eighteen-centimeter-tall friends. It’s almost pointless to make friends with them. Some aren’t my friends anyways, and those are usually the ones who make fun of my height.

How: Take your used ink cartridges to your closest Office Depot or Staples. The former’ll give you a free ream of recycled paper; the latter $3 off your next purchase.

The other award went to Kodak’s Scan Station 100 and it was called the Government Computer News Best of FOSE Award. FOSE stands for the Federal Office Supplies Expo and is basically the largest convention for government agencies and companies selling to the gov. The Scan Station 100 is designed to quickly turn paper documents into digital files which can then be stored on the network and shared with others all around.

I need not extend myself too far to demonstrate my nerd bona fides. My next purchase as soon as I save up the $69, is the LL Bean "Super Shockwave" Laptop Backpack. On my "I pine for it" list, once I move, is the Levenger Editor's Desk. In fact, I pore over my Levenger catalogue with excitement and desire--they are the "tools for serious readers." Who doesn't want a monogrammed leather International Pocket Briefcase to record your flashes of brilliance? A Levenger Lap Desk for those who like to study in bed or in armchairs? Yes please! Also, bear witness to my photo album of nerd accoutrements on the left sidebar. Yes, I do own a Star Trek pop-up book. Yes, I do possess two literary action figures, one of Oscar Wilde, the other of Jane Austen. No, I do not play with them--they are in mint condition, and I want to keep them that way. I do take them out to look at them from time to time though. I think I would be happy with just two more: Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot, if they exist. This isn't even the entire collection of nerd accoutrements mind you--let's not get started on the office supplies, the filing system, the huge bookcase over-spilling with heady tomes of law, literature, poetry, Latin textbooks. I am Nerd. Hear me ROAR.

If you use a reputable retailer for your home/office supplies they should have a clear policy in place not only about faulty toners but what happens if a cartridge has somehow caused damage to your machine (this would be very unusual by the way). Under these circumstances this policy should give you a full warranty to have the equipment repaired ASAP at no cost to you.

I had an interview this morning and stopped by the local Pearl art supply store looking for resume paper. I like Southworth’s “Round Corner Paper” but I haven’t been able to find any more at the local Staples or Office Depot. I didn’t find any at Pearl (last night, I reluctantly bought a pack of “Exceptional Resume Paper” since that’s all I could find anywhere), but while walking around, I found some stationary and journal stuff with this black and white, 13 year old goth girl on the cover. Emily the Strange.

In preparation for data entry into the expense ledger, I pull out each month of receipts and sort them by date. On most receipts I highlight the items I’m going to be entering, so the data entry will go faster. Then I paper clip each month together and place them in a stack for data entry. After I complete entering each month of receipts, I place them back in the folder they came out of. By prepping first you avoid errors, such as a receipt filed in the wrong month, and it makes the entire process go much faster. From start to finish, I can get it all entered in a few days, only spending a couple of hours each day. I typically spend the first day getting everything ready for data entry, and the next two days getting it all entered.

Since then I’ve been preparing for finals. I have three this week (today is Environmental Law, tomorrow is Conflicts of Law, and Thursdsay is Capital Punishment). Next week I have a final in Secured Transactions and have a take-home final due in Comparative Law. Along with that stuff, I also am wrapping up my bankruptcy directed research paper (I now have my 45 required pages, but still have lots of editing and rewriting to do) and need to get the final documentation in on my externship.

Another example. I bought some hard drives at Staples on Black Friday for $30 each. I stood in the cold for an hour, fought through a horde, and captured my prizes. I absolutely had no intention of using them, and instead was going to sell them on Ebay. The retail price of them regularly was $120, FYI. On Ebay, they were going for (and went for) about $70 each. Which, FYI, is enough profit to pay for my hotel in Vegas, our share of gasoline, and snacks on the trip there and back. And the way I see it, there are a lot of people out there who don’t have access to a Staples, or didn’t choose to get up at 5AM to stand in the cold, and those people still saved $50 per hard drive by buying it from us on Ebay. They win, we win. Life is good. Yay capitalism.

In the book The Fifth Discipline, staple of business school bookshelves everywhere, the author describes a concept of personal growth that consists of patent awareness of reality versus goal states. The two situations (reality and goals) then stand connected as with a rubber band, so that the individual has two options: either change the reality to meet the goals, or refashion the goals to meet the reality. The preference usually lies with the former option.

We recently had a visitor to our office trying to sell us office supplies and stuff. She asked us who our preferred provider was already. Was it Staples? OfficeMax, OfficeDepot?

Offering free shipping to customers that order $100 or more of merchandise is another no-brainer. These are the customers you want to cater to. They’ll come back to you because they know you do free shipping (that’s one of the reasons why we always get our office supplies from staples though it may be cheaper elsewhere).

She attends McDonalds everyday. Fine, your life choice, not mine. But at least three days out of the week she brings it back to the office. If she doesn’t eat the McDonalds in the office, she’ll bring back a sleeve of fries and a McChicken for later. A little snack in-between classes. Nothing tastier than cold McDonalds. Try sucking on a lead pencil, it tastes the same.

I knew I needed some heavy card stock. So, I traveled to Staples and then to a local copy center, both of which didn't have what I needed. Staples carry the self-printing, perforated-edge business cards, the kind that you stick into your printer like a sheet of paper. Those aren't for me, but if you're looking to cut cost even more and are willing to sacrifice paper thickness (and overall appearance), by all means go for it. While I was at Staples, however, I picked up a customizable stamp kit that ran me about $14. Not too shabby considering what was in the kit: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 line, large oval and circle stamp templates along with upper and lower-case letters (with each letter having roughly 3-5 duplicates) and special characters; an ink pad; tweezers to put the letters into the template (though fingers work just as well) and a holder to put the template into.

Probably one of the less useful events they hold yearly at work is something called “Vendor Day”. Basically, various companies (hotels, office supplies and tzchotchky/doodad makers) show up, set up a table, and hand out pens and brochures.

Monday was here and I arrived to work in my new outfit. Because I had no energy, I took the elevator, which is sort of unusual for me. As the elevator opened I stepped out to what I could only describe as a human fly paper trap. Workers were apparently laying new flooring and had spread adhesive all on the floor and left for it to cure without roping off the area. My new shoes and I were stuck to the floor. I finally pulled myself free and proceeded to collect every thing from the elevator to my cubicle. The stray paper clip and the confetti from the shredder, to name a few.

I am a collector of office supplies – a collector, not a user; however, I’m working on changing that. There are so many possibilities in a blank paper, a new pen, or a package of stickers. I love to go to office supply stores merely to browse. Luckily, I’ve never been one to buy a lot. I buy sparingly and just hang on to the things I have.

Even more resourceful was his insistence on keeping the family pencil factory going while he struggled for sustinence in the woods. Why pencils? Well, he was a writer, and this was the middle of the 19th century, before typewriters came on the scene. In those days pencils were big business, and siting one close to sources of timber and charcoal was a surefire guarantee of success.

He used to push so hard when he would write that you could read the indentation of what he wrote like 3 pages down! Funny thing is, Ben holds the pencil the same exact way Darryl did! Pretty cool. I love seeing the ways that Ben is like Darryl.

I finally realized it was over when I visited you last week. My expectations were low. I knew I wasn’t going to see anything amazing, either in product or price. I just wanted a memo pad, the kind with a spiral binding on the top that sells in the school supplies segment of a supermarket for 59 cents. I went to the notebook aisle, and there was a messy pile of “premium” memo pads that were too bulky to fit in my note holder. Mixed in with it was a single, Staples branded notebook with a yellow cover. I took it up to the front.

Since it is Labor Day weekend, my labor is to pull a clean sweep on my office, specifically the closet. It’s chock full of said office supplies, various cables, music, electronic gear, and a plastic sword. So far I’ve managed to pull it all out into the middle of the room so that the place does look like one of the hapless souls on TV. I’ve got a picture here, and hopefully will be able to post an "after" shot by mid-week.

This is an actual newspaper headline - “Scrapbooking store binds hobbyists via array of staples “. You can see the article online at this link (Fortunately it isn’t one of those papers making you register your email address to read their stuff).

I like my class but it makes me a little upset that I don't enjoy it as much as I could. In class, sometimes (like tonight) I was yawning and just ready to go home about half way through. After a full day of work and then a stop over at Staples to print off my assignment, then to the library because the girl at Staples told me it would take two hours to print my stuff. I've taken stuff their before and that's never happened. She said 2 hours for colour printing (which is what I wanted). Then I asked what about black and white? She said 30 mins. I didn't get that logic. I only had 6 pages to print and I said nevermind and left for the library. Let's just say my library experience was not a great one.

Hey, go here and read about the invention and history of the paper clip.

I made my own got-damn rubber band ball because it is a slow day here at the orifice, but I'll be doggone. You can buy them pre-made.

its made up entirely of post office rubber bands. everyday i get the office mail it has a rubber band around it. i decided to start making them into a ball. once it gets big enough i’m going to take it down the street to the post office and return it to them.

Another frustration is that I have not found the printer I want. We purchased a HP Officejet 7310 (an inkjet all in one), but I simply cannot get it to work on my Mac. The software crashes every time, and I have the latest version. It installed fine on my laptop, but spending $550 CDN + 15% tax (a premium to what it is selling for in the US) on something that doesn’t even work is insane. So I will be returning it to Staples..

Anyone with a love of building things out of paper will enjoy this site. Inside this blog you will find links to origami, info on paper Disney castles, way cool japanese ‘make-it-yourself’ paper version of Life, and other coolness.

I’ve been trying out Plaxo the past couple of days. I am an extremely lazy person when it comes to updating my address book and I usually just try to label emails with “Contact Information” if I get an address update. And I have a stack of business cards with a rubber band around them in my desk drawer at home..

I lost my silver Fisher Space Pen a few weeks ago! Since then, I have been using cheapie pens at work and carrying nothing with me. Whenever my wife and I go to the office supply stores (not often), I would look to see if they have Fisher Space Pens. The local Office Depot had the silver one, but I wanted to get the black version because it does not have the grip on the pen — I loved the silver one, but the grip on the pen hurt my fingers after a while. While in Milpitas yesterday, my wife and I stopped by the Staples where she got me the original silver Fisher Space Pen and we found the black version! Yay! Now I have a Space Pen with me again. I think I’ll forego getting the Writer’s Edge leather pen pouch this time around (it was only $3) though. I have a review of the Space Pen at Epinions.

I was just happily printing away this past week, minding my own business when suddenly tragedy struck. My printer had stopped printing. Did it have a driver error, did lightning strike it, or did it just die and go to the big paper tray in the sky. No, it turns out I just ran out of ink. No problem, I will just plop a new cartridge in and off I go. Drat! I had no extra cartridges, so alass I guess I have to go to the store and pickup some ink along with some bread and milk, too. I did not understand it, I have only had my new HP All-in-One printer for a couple of months. Oh well, time to visit my favorite office store, Office Max, or Office Depot, or something with Office in it.

A man and his wife were having some problems at home and were giving each other the silent treatment. Suddenly, the man realized that the next day, he would need his wife to wake him at 5:00 AM for an early morning business flight. Not wanting to be the first to break the silence (and LOSE), he wrote on a piece of paper,” Please wake me at 5:00 AM.” He left it where he knew she would find it. The next morning, the man woke up, only to discover it was 9:00AM and he had missed his flight. Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn’t wakened him, when he noticed a piece of paper by the bed. The paper said, “It is 5:00 AM. Wake up.”

Saturday I went through my office closet and weeded out the shelves. At first the task seemed overwhelming as there were so many magazines, office supplies, computer supplies, etc. But, one-by-one, I reviewed items and determined whether they held any value for me anymore. Yeah, those older Family Handyman magazines are too good to throw out. No, I don’t need to keep these 5-year-old out-of-date system software disks for the old computer I just replaced. After a while, I had a bag of papers for recycling, a trash can filled with unrecylables, and several items that I might be able to sell on eBay.

Meanwhile, the broader push for homeland security has prompted the creation of new initiatives to prevent cyberterrorism, a nebulous but serious thread to the American way of life. According to war games, a North Korean or Chinese hacker with a paper clip, a rubber band, and an Atari could destroy a significant portion of America’s electronic infrastructure, to significant economic and social detriment—and presumably to the consternation of politicians who face reelection. In response to this looming threat, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, loaded with measures intended to create greater security for America’s electronic networks, while also improving corporate governance and preventing fraud. Although the bill is unquestionably thick and laden with requirements, is it up to the task of protecting the homeland? Previous encounters between business and industry suggest not. In this article, I evaluate major failings in Sarbanes-Oxley and suggest alternatives.

For those who don’t know, I happen to have a fetish for office supplies and stationary. I’m not kidding. I get worked up over new pens, pencils, notebooks (especially Moleskine), printers, staplers… I could go on forever. Browsing through Officeworks on a lazy day is my idea of heaven.

since it was revealed the day after memorial day, and after mentioning it to some people, i’ve gotten a lot of the same questions over and over, so i decided to write this article to answer all those questions as well as serve as a howto for others choosing to waste office supplies in a similar artistic endeavor.

If you are a retailer, you should think about this. Yes, you still have to appeal to the majority of people who are soberly looking for chairs and office supplies. But you can also appeal to enthusiastic impulse buyers with a timely hook, a sample sale angle that makes customers feel you're putting them in the know, and they have to act fast to scoop their fellow shoppers who have less of the "trained eye." The thrill of the hunt that you give them will keep them coming back.

Speaking of spending, today I reserved a rental car for our apartment hunting trip, as well as a moving truck and the movers to pack it. Also, seeing as how I’m oddly excited by office supplies, I bought a ridiculously large Sharpie at Jewel. You’ll be able to read our box labels from space.

I don't think that I will ever be able to explain my odd love/fascination with office supplies, namely Sharpie Markers. (Chris over at RudeCactus surely understands... he's an Office Supply Fiend™ as well.) OK, Sharpies and Post-It Notes. (Hey, at least I didn't try to claim that I invented Post-It Notes, like Romy and Michele did in their movie...)

What, for example, does one call an interoffice mail envelope? You know, something like, this brown, 10″ x 13″, string-tied, hole-ridden envelope. If you’re in the Air Force, it’s a Holy Joe. The Army calls it a Shotgun and the Navy and Marine Corps call it Guard Mail.

No wonder the services can’t communicate. They can’t name their office supplies the same.

This should come as no surprise - I was a quirky kid. Hell, I'm a quirky adult. When I was around 11 or 12, while most kids were entertaining themselves by collecting baseball cards or playing video games (although truth be told, I spent a lot of time in the local arcades), I developed a love of office supplies.

As part of my new position, I get two of the coolest office supplies known to man:

The less cool of the two is a big stamp that says “PASS” for when a Report crosses my desk that meets requirements (every bit as exciting as it sounds. I’m officially a paper-pusher now). The more cool is one that says “FAIL.” I was hoping to get one with big RED letters for a little projected frustration at all the FAILs that I always got (and we all always got).

Once every couple years I make my way to Europe for vacation, and the past few times i've made it a point to stop by a Muji outlet whenever I do. I love Muji. While the IKEA experience is built to disorient you and trick you into overspending, Muji stores are small and well organized. When you enter the store you see three distinct sections - office supplies, home and kitchen furnishings and clothes. It's easy to find everything you want, nothing is overpriced, and everything is stylish and well made.

First I have to say I have an unhealthy love of office supplies. I’m like the dad in the famous commercial (but for different reasons).

Most of us, when we think of Franz Kafka, the words “impulse buyer” come to mind. Well, we might also think of a quasi-cubicle drone so traumatised by his office environment he tweaks himself into a beetle and locks himself in his childhood bedroom whilst making high-pitched insect noises. This exquisite writing device would make either the doomed protagonist of that office ur-text, The Metamorphosis, or its author put a smile on his face. I’d go so f