Kerianne's Epic Journey with the Mechanical Pencil
Kerianne Hobbs
Issue date: 4/15/09 Section: Final Approach
I hate mechanical pencils. I am one of the only engineering students at ERAU, if not the only one, to not use mechanical pencils. Whenever I go to sharpen my pencil before class starts, I never fail to get at least one sneering and snide comment about my archaic writing utensil. This is the story of my love-hate relationship with the mechanical pencil.
I remember when I bought my first mechanical pencil. It was hot pink with a lime green pocket clip and a purple soft finger grip. The year was 1999, and a spry young fifth-grade girl traded a dollar for the colorful, academic mechanism and a clear plastic case of lead from the school store.
The lead was loaded in the writing tip. Do you see the first problem? As the writing tip was large enough for the user to load lead, when the user went to write what were sure to be genius and inspirational fifth-grade English and math homework answers, the lead would simply slide back into the pencil. When I ran out of lead, I found that reloading my technological masterpiece left traces of graphite all over my thumb and index finger.
The engineer in eleven-year-old me found that if I held the pencil just right I could get it to perform its intended duties. The next problem came when I began to make my fervent fifth-grade erasures, jamming the eraser against the page with the assumption that doing so somehow made my errors erase more completely. By the time my misspelled word was erased, the lead was sticking a good inch out of the top of my pencil. If there wasn't that much lead left, the remaining lead would gracefully leap from my pencil tip to a place about a foot from where I zealously eradicated my mistaken pencil marks.
By the time that I ran out of lead, I was so frustrated that I swore off mechanical pencils forever. That was, until I came to work at NASA. Defeated by the remoteness of pencil sharpeners at NASA, I went back on my solemn vow that I would never use a mechanical pencil again, and pulled one from the supply cabinet in my office.
I remember when I bought my first mechanical pencil. It was hot pink with a lime green pocket clip and a purple soft finger grip. The year was 1999, and a spry young fifth-grade girl traded a dollar for the colorful, academic mechanism and a clear plastic case of lead from the school store.
The lead was loaded in the writing tip. Do you see the first problem? As the writing tip was large enough for the user to load lead, when the user went to write what were sure to be genius and inspirational fifth-grade English and math homework answers, the lead would simply slide back into the pencil. When I ran out of lead, I found that reloading my technological masterpiece left traces of graphite all over my thumb and index finger.
The engineer in eleven-year-old me found that if I held the pencil just right I could get it to perform its intended duties. The next problem came when I began to make my fervent fifth-grade erasures, jamming the eraser against the page with the assumption that doing so somehow made my errors erase more completely. By the time my misspelled word was erased, the lead was sticking a good inch out of the top of my pencil. If there wasn't that much lead left, the remaining lead would gracefully leap from my pencil tip to a place about a foot from where I zealously eradicated my mistaken pencil marks.
By the time that I ran out of lead, I was so frustrated that I swore off mechanical pencils forever. That was, until I came to work at NASA. Defeated by the remoteness of pencil sharpeners at NASA, I went back on my solemn vow that I would never use a mechanical pencil again, and pulled one from the supply cabinet in my office.
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