Thought for the Day -

Where do pens go? Is there a lost island of biros somewhere?

In the days when I had a regular office job, I could never keep the same cheap black biro pen for one week straight. I’m like a smoker with a 20 a-week habit, only instead of bad breath and yellow fingers I’ve got half a dozen black plastic pen tops on my desk. Wherever they go they obviously don’t need their tops.

I went through a stage of thinking the cleaning lady was taking my pens and squeezing out the black ink to use as hair dye (why else would she need 20 pens a week?). I then worked out that pens, just like gossip, must do the rounds of the office, and surely – according to some natural law of lost stuff – they will end up back in my hand eventually. I secretly marked my pens but they never came back. Eaten somewhere by something that lives in a dark corner of the office at night!!

Is stuff ever even lost anyway? It’s lost to us and found to other people. Everything has to be somewhere, so where are my pens?

DT