Confused yet?
My most favorite pen is a Parker Jotter. Specifically, a Parker Jotter with a blue barrel and a silver top. Specifically, a Parker Jotter with a blue barrel and a silver top that contains blue ink, because I am partial to blue ink. I had two of them. One had, over the years, somehow gone “out of round” and the clicker mechanism sticks. The second - my go-to pen - somehow disappeared somewhere between my car and my school (or perhaps my school and my car, depending on when I lost it). Anyway, it’s gone.
And replacing it has been a pain, because all of my trips to the office supply store have turned up fruitless. No Parker Jotter with a blue barrel and a sliver top (none of them have blue ink, by the way. You just have to buy that separately). So, needing to write, I have set off in search of a suitable replacement. (Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, “why don’t you just order a replacement from Amazon?” And one of these days, I’m going to write my entry on why I am trying to wean myself off of Amazon, but at the end of the day the simple answer is because it seems like a ridiculous amount of effort to simply have a pen delivered to my home. A picker to a packer to a driver to a pilot to a driver to a warehouseman to a packer to a driver just to get to my home?? This is almost as ridiculous as how much time I wasted buying my new pen in the first place!!)
I’ve had other pens over the years. My previous absolute favorite was my Cross retractable ballpoint pen. I had several of those - still have one or two - but I went off of them because I found them to be annoyingly slim. Built like a tank, but two delicate for my everyday use (but it did look good in my pocket during my Wall Street years).
I also liked the Pentel G7 pens. I like that they are refillable and the purple ones are my favorite for grading. I like the blue ones too, but I find that sometimes the gel ink gets smudged. But, in a pinch, it’s a good pen. EXCEPT - for the clip. The plastic clip never seems to last, which seems to render the refillability somewhat moot.
For Christmas, my daughter bought me two Beatles pens. These are the retractable kind, which I like, and, right off the bat, a lot better than the Beatles pens I bought on a trip to Epcot Center several years ago, which write like crap and had an annoying sticker that left a horrendous residue on the barrel of what was a very attractive pen.
But, as well as they wrote, I was still partial to the Parker. Until that got lost, and the Beatles pen was pushed into service. And I know why they sell two at a time. Because #1 fell apart (literally) after about a week, rendering it useless. Into the garbage it went.
And out came #2. And I discovered something remarkable. I discovered that if I replaced the cheap ink refill with a Parker refill, I had a reasonable facsimile of my Parker Jotter - at least as far as ink was concerned. The workmanship was lacking, but hey, it worked.
And worked it did. Right up until this past Thursday, when it went missing. It’s got to be somewhere, but I don’t know where.
So I struggled with a stick pen on Friday, which is an abomination as far as I’m concerned. Taking off a cap and replacing a cap is only a sure fire way to LOSE a cap. Which led me to Walmart - or at least that’s where I was today when I decided I had to buy some pens.
I looked and looked. I don’t like Pentech pens for some reason. And there were no Pentel pens in blue. And a million stick pens. Finally, after like 15 minutes (really, 15 minutes to pick out a package of $3 pens), I decided on the Bic Atlantis. It’s blue, it’s medium point, it’s retractable, and it has a metal clip. And it was made in France, just like my beloved Jotter.
As for how it works as a pen, we’ll see. But if I lose this one - there’s still 4 more in the package.
