let’s discuss sacred office supplies

by Alison Green on March 28, 2024

Thanks to a reader for this idea: “What supplies or equipment at your office are as untouchable as a holy relic, despite having no discernible function in the 21st century? What supplies do people inexplicably hoard, or somehow lead to epic battles for control?”

Let’s discuss in the comment section.

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  1. Meg*

    I got really really tired of people swiping post-it notes off my desk, so I went out and bought black post-its that require a colored gel pen to actually see anything on them. They stopped going missing after that. >:)

    1. AVP*

      heh. At an old job my stapler kept disappearing, so I brought in my own really cool one — that only used smaller non-standard-size staples.

      1. Nicole T*

        When I started a 100% work from home gig years ago (past job), I bought myself a red Swingline. That is now my home stapler I rarely use for current work stuff. I recently bought a tiny matching one I can take on the go for volunteering stuff. I will burn down the world before I give up my red stapler.

        My current editing gig is completely digital, but I still keep a copy of our old style guide (new version is digital) and a print Merriam-Webster dictionary at my desk. I never use them, but it feels weird not to have them!

        1. Jules*

          At my old job I requested a red Swingline stapler. I wish I’d taken it with me when I left…

          I read somewhere that when they filmed Office Space, the props department painted a black Swingline red because Swingline didn’t make a red one at the time. After the movie came out, they got so many requests for it that they started making red ones.

          1. HappyEveryDayNow*

            I love my red Swingline stapler! It’s from an early career job (circa 1984) and now my home office go-to that I’ll never give up.

        3. Not my usual*

          I work for a GIS (geographic coordinate system/mapping/data) software company. I still have multiple atlases that I use to check boundaries, locations of tiny island possessions and countries, etc. It’s just faster sometimes than checking our own online data and/or finding decent maps from other providers.

          I also have a very old UNIX for Dummies (Quick Reference) book (1997) that is used for the multiple tips&tricks written on the inside covers! I did look up something this month.

        5. Aphra*

          I’m in the UK and when I read your post I couldn’t understand why you’d be so attached to a red stapler. I was thinking “well, I’d always choose a sensible black stapler but let’s look online to see what a red Swingline stapler has that’s so spec…. [sound of angels singing] ah, NOW I understand.”

    2. Anon Again... Naturally*

      Our office had the same problem. My solution was to back a Kickstarter for magnetic post it sized whiteboard squares. Unfortunately, they didn’t arrive until after we were sent home for Covid, where I no longer had convenient metal seams to stick them too. Work from home became permanent and I’ve never once used them.

      1. Me1980*

        I backed that one, too! They didn’t work for me, but I thought it was such a great idea.

      2. It’s Suzy Now*

        TV writers rooms switched to magnetic dry erase “index cards“ almost 10 years ago, I’m surprised this needed to be kickstarted. I think you can just buy them. Although since the company was buying them, I have no idea what they cost.

      2. dawbs*

        My smartphone has my RPN calculator emulator so I don’t have to re-learn how to use other calculators.
        (I’ll also share that when we got married, repeatedly, my husband asked for a calculator and was handed that hp and I converted him, so he has to have the hp app on his phone too, and he didn’t even learn them young)

      1. Oh yeah, Me again*

        I have an old Swingline “Tot’ at home that is my only stapler there. I’ll continue to use it as long as I can fine staples to fit. It never jams, that I recall.

        1. Willow Sunstar*

          I have a red Swingline. Yes, I’m an Office Space fan. Sadly, I can only show it off at home now, used to live on my desk pre-COVID.

    2. AngryOctopus*

      I love my “scratch” lab book where I write down what I’m doing, where I take notes on things, etc. But I also buy them for myself because I want fun and fancy ones, and it’s a minimal expense (I also buy ones for home use at the same time, so I have quite a collection).

    3. Science Liege*

      We still use paper notebooks where I work. They refuse to switch to ELN. It is so frustrating.

    4. Set999*

      Yes! Though our lab isn’t entirely digital yet, but they did away with “formal” lab notebooks. I have what is basically a branded legal pad that keeps falling apart. It’s greatttt.

    5. SJ Coffee Adict*

      I use a moleskine, I can sketch, put to do lists, take meeting notes. I never leave my desk without it.

    6. Nesprin*

      +1 million- good hard covered lab notebooks with sewn in pages and page numbers are hard to find.

    8. EngineeringFun*

      The size of my lab note books has reduced but must be hard covered so I can walk around and write on it. If it isnt written down, it doesn’t get done!

    9. JustaTech*

      When we gave up our lab notebooks (several years before getting an ELN, hmmm…) They said that as long as we blacked out the company name we could take home as many as we liked, so now I have two, one for my garden and one for recipes/ my sourdough experiments, and I gave a fat stack to a friend who I knew would *love* them for his garden.

      But even now I can’t use them to just “take notes” – I’ve got to have a title and date and purpose on every page. My professors did too well.

    11. Cazaril*

      When my father (a chemist) died, I found a number of unused small lab books in his effects. I grabbed a couple to have for general use as a memorial. At work, we use an ELN system and I’m never looking back, but the vintage lab notebooks make me smile!

  3. Viki*

    Office supplies: Sharpie markers, I have no clue why they’re currency.

    Branded office: the really cheap sunglasses. I have no clue why my company ordered branded sunglasses like we’re a university freshman class, but those were impossible to find after like 30 minutes

    2. Ipsissima*

      Us too! We have plenty of supplies on hand, the admin assistant is very prompt with reordering, and yet I cannot keep a single sharpie on my desk for more than a day.

      2. Charlotte Lucas*

        When you need a Sharpie, nothing else will do!

        I pack up records for storage. Ballpoints are useless on the boxes.

    3. RabbitRabbit*

      My husband had problems with Sharpies getting ‘borrowed’ at work and not replaced. I told him to get a pink Sharpie and swap the pink cap onto his black pen in order to make it not look like it’s what someone wants to use.

      3. AnonPi*

        My former admin used to do this with pens, she’d buy the ones that were pink for breast cancer awareness, but they still wrote black.

        1. Not The Earliest Bird*

          I do this. I have my pink Pilot G-2 pens. Everyone knows their mine. If they’re on someone else’s desk, they got swiped from me (or more likely I left it there).

        2. Random Dice*

          See, finally there’s a reason for the more-expensive girrrlwashed supplies in this world. To fight office theft!

      4. Chocoholic*

        Not so much at work, but at home I try to get everything I can in pink. Nobody else wants to borrow my pink Hydroflask, my kids didn’t want to play on my phone with the pink case when they were smaller, etc. It definitely keeps my stuff from walking away with my family members.

        1. Kelly White*

          My big burly electrician brother has a set of pink flowered handled screwdrivers for work. He says no-one steals them!

          2. NotJane*

            I used to work an admin job at a commercial roofing company and my office supplies keep disappearing until I swapped everything to pink – stapler, staple remover, pens, post-its, legal pads, etc!

            1. Anon for a Moment*

              When I was still teaching (university students), I occasionally would get burly guys who thought that I (a wee woman) was somehow unworthy to teach them and made that belief known in various ways in class. I would grade their papers in the most obnoxious shades of pink possible because I could see their embarrassment at carrying around a paper with pink ink all over it. (Ah, toxic masculinity…)

      5. BlondeSpiders*

        Brilliant. This is also an old chef’s trick. Works wonders in male-dominated kitchens.

        I am all for using the patriarchy against those who perpetrate it. :)

        1. I Am Not An Engineer*

          In any big touring rock show, the backpacks that hold headsets, belt packs and lighting gels for the local crew spotlight operators are always, without fail, pink and sparkly little girls’ school bags. Unicorns, Dora The Explorer, My Little Pony, etc.

          Keeps them from getting stolen. Draw your own conclusions.

          1. Possum's Mom*

            Ahhh yes, my roadie days, when the first thing you learn is to NEVER LET ANYONE “BORROW” YOUR GAFFER’S TAPE during stage setup. It will vanish like Brigadoon, as will the person who says “I”ll be right back with it”.

            1. Sharpiecollector*

              And if you lend someone a sharpie (and they have to be a really good friend before I’ll even consider it), keep the lid and give them the pen – much less likely to lose it that way

            2. Jay*

              You can get that in purple.
              I run the shop at the company I work for and anything that might grow legs either gets our name stenciled on it or covered in bright, Radioactive Barny The Dinosaur, purple duct tape.

      6. LikesToSwear*

        When I worked for a roofer, my good pens would constantly disappear because the boss would grab one, leave it in his truck (he was usually in the field), and repeat so frequently I would make him give me his keys on a regular basis and clean out his truck.

        I eventually bought green floral tape and small silk flowers and decorated the top half of a couple of pens. They never disappeared again – he wouldn’t touch them! It was great! And they were refillable, so I was able to buy refills instead of completely new pens all the time.

      7. Bitte Meddler*

        Not work, but when I had both of my bathrooms remodeled at the same time, I arranged for a Port-a-Potty to be put in my driveway (back behind the gate, not visible from the street) so I could still live at home during the renovation. Of course, the construction crews used it, too, and . . . ew.

        After several days of being thoroughly grossed out, I printed out pages of coloring book flowers, carefully colored them with markers and colored pencils, cut-and-taped some of them into flower garlands, and then taped all of them up inside the Port-a-Potty so that everywhere you looked there were colorful flowers, like a Victorian sitting room. Lastly, I put up a sign that said, “The homeowner uses this toilet, too!”

        Worked like a charm.

      8. Butterfly Counter*

        I remember a Reader’s Digest funny work story of a woman who worked as the only woman in an auto shop. Her oil rags kept going missing (sounds like the mechanics brought them in themselves) and no one would confess to taking hers. So she got a new batch of rags and sewed lace all around the outside of them. Never had another one get stolen…

      9. Macropodidae*

        At the small company I work for, we lose enough pens that we just buy boxes of misprints. The only ones still on my desk are pink (black ink).

    4. AngryOctopus*

      Solvent resistant lab markers disappear on the regular here. Mostly because if yours dies while you’re in the middle of labelling, you don’t want to walk all the way down to the supply shelves unless it’s necessary. So if someone else has a working one just sitting there…

      1. Jenn*

        Another lab scientist here: use lab tape to label your Sharpie as “biohazard” or “dirty” and they’ll be less likely to swipe it.

        Also for tax, our lab still keeps a paper cutter. We went 90% paperless last year.

        1. AngryOctopus*

          Eh, I find people just peel the tape off. They’re like “we all handle the same stuff”. But at least my job keeps a good supply (it’s just being not lazy and walking to get them that’s our problem!).

        2. Ace in the Hole*

          EHS person here: please don’t do that. It’s really important that hazard labels only be used for actual hazards, otherwise people get in the habit of ignoring them.

          1. JSPA*

            I don’t think anyone’s talking about using the actual symbol. In a lab setting, “dirty” can equally mean, “potentially hot” (and lives in the hot hood, in the more completely labeled box); not specially cleaned (a warning about not using it in clean spaces / cell culture); not nuclease-free (if your lab does a lot of RNA-work), etc etc etc.

            The ambiguity is enough to stop it from getting swiped for taking phone messages.

            In some labs, “clean” can do the same.

            IMO, anyone who decides to ignore warnings because they’re not all equally dangerous (for whatever reason) at any one point in time? They’re a walking hazard all by themselves.

            After all, an autoclaved biohazard bag is no longer biohazardous, either.

            Anyone who’d extrapolate from specific instances to “all things marked biohazard” should not be in lab spaces, as there’s no adequate protection for them…nor against them.

            1. Student*

              You work in very casual labs with hazards that are apparently not all that serious. I hope you never start working in a lab with serious hazards.

              In my labs, a pen labeled “dirty” in a lab could cost us thousands of dollars in remediation work, to clean the area for potential contamination, redo lots of work, repurchase supplies that may have been contaminated. A pen that’s just labeled “dirty” to scare people off from stealing it will trigger the same initial contamination control measures as a real “dirty” pen. It’ll eventually be tested, but there will already be consequences merely from finding it.

              At least a dozen people who use the lab will then be forced to go through extra training as to what to do with “dirty” pens lasting, at minimum, an hour.

              Depending on the specific lab, a bunch of people might also be required to undertake medical tests and might be afraid for their health until the results come back, and possibly for the health of their close contacts (like their family).

              I had one guy who belatedly found out from a careless colleague that he’d been standing in an area she had contaminated and not cleaned properly. So he unknowingly had contamination on his shoes. That he had worn home. Where his very young baby decided to play with the shoelaces. They were calling emergency hotlines, rushing the baby to a doctor, rushing the shoes off for analysis, and absolutely besides themselves. The careless colleague got fired. The baby had an unpleasant experience with the necessary treatment, but was ultimately okay.

              1. JSPA*

                If you’re in a BSL2 or BSL3 or BSL4 lab, you know that you are. You also know (or should know) that most labs are not at that level. This is a “not everyone can eat sandwiches” situation.

                Yes–there certainly are labs where this would be completely unacceptable.

                There are 13 actual or planned BSL4 complexes in the entire US. 148 institutions have one or more BSL3 labs.

                In contrast, several US cities have several hundred BSL1 labs.

                So your circumstance, while very real, is not a reason to come down like a hammer on the vast majority of labs where this would be…fine.

      2. WeirdChemist*

        Ugh yes, lab markers and pens never stay where you put them… I had an old lab mate that would rifle through peoples lab coat pockets instead of just walking to the other side of the room to get a new one! I also had some equipment with a paper log book where the pen kept going missing. I ended up tying the pen to the instrument itself, and it occasionally STILL disappeared… the instrument was literally right next to where we kept the supplies! Literally easier to just grab a new one than to untie a pen from a complicated knot!! I don’t get people lol

        1. Reluctant Mezzo*

          I will admit that one time I was nearly out of paperclips, and so I went around the cubicles chanting ‘paperclips for the poor, paperclips for the poor…” and discovered that nobody ever needs to open a new box of them ever again. We don’t have an infinite number of paperclips, but you can see it from here.

    5. Rage*

      Don’t know if it’s still a thing, but about 20 years ago, a local aerospace manufacturer uncovered an illicit drug ring amongst employees, using Sharpie markers for the transfers at work. They took out the tip, drained the marker fluid, rinsed out the inside, put the drug inside, then replaced the tip and cap. Each color had a specific drug/amount attached to it, so people would pay for X grams of Y drug, and then the dealer would simply hand them the Sharpie at some point during the day. Nobody thought twice about employees with Sharpie markers in their pockets.

      I don’t recall how they eventually uncovered it (probably busted someone for smoking it in the parking lot and found a huge supply of markers), and I’m sure everyone got tired of stopping and searching engineers and their writing implements, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it resurfaced repeatedly. And I’m equally sure that it is likely to have evolved separately in a variety of places.

      So, if Sharpies are weirdly a hot commodity…maybe you have a bigger problem?

      1. Ace in the Hole*

        Sharpies are a hot item for us because the storage closet for office supplies is on the other side of the facility, and the nature of our work means we are constantly losing/dropping/breaking markers.

        I admit, I have swiped orphaned pens on occasion. if the alternative is putting down everything, taking off my PPE, scrubbing off a bunch of mud, and going a quarter mile out of my way…. I’m just gonna take the pen someone left on the bench.

      2. Teach*

        Huh. This is how I ran a note-passing ring in junior high in the 80’s, but with empty highlighters. I guess I did not take my nefariousness to its full potential!

    6. Nesprin*

      +1 except the alcohol proof lab markers instead of sharpies- those are more precious than gold.

      1. JustaTech*

        Seriously. I am forever taking the Sharpies out to the lab (and putting them in the office) so that people don’t use a Sharpie to label something and then spray it with alcohol and oops, there goes their careful labeling!

      2. JSPA*

        VWR FTW! (And real lab tape. And parafilm.) Seriously, I have privately bought (and hoarded) all of the above.

    7. Elly*

      In my last office, it was the double ended Sharpie markers – fine handwriting tip on one end, and the usual thicker nib on the other. They were like unofficial currency, I could get anything repaired in my office by handing them over!

      My leaving present from the office team was two packs of the Sharpies, and two packs of the giant post-it notes that I love (they are A5 – about half a letter page size for those in the US)

      1. Lpuk*

        I love the giant post it notes. I do facilitation work for clients and every time I request a room set- up, I ask for the really big ones and sharpies ( cos photographing walls of feedback and trying to interpret ballpoint scrawls of tiny post it notes is hard work). They Never have the right size, so I always end up bringing my own – yes even when I’m travelling internationally with cabin bags only)

    8. Project maniac-ger*

      I order supplies for our office and I’m darn near ready to Amazon Subscribe and Save sharpies so we get a new box monthly.

    9. goddessoftransitory*

      I adore Sharpies, especially new ones. That fat, slick way they glide across the paper is the closest I’ll ever get to being a figure skating champion. Twirl, swirl, sign my name in cursive!

      1. Cherry Sours*

        +1

        I find the fat green sharpies are great for labeling moving boxes, have used them for several moves myself.

  4. Wordnerd*

    I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re asking, since no one is actively hanging on to them now, but every time I have to clean out an old collection of office supplies (which I’ve done a lot in the last few years as my legacy university department keeps moving spaces), I find just bags and bags and heaps and heaps of binder clips. SO MANY BINDER CLIPS. Those and staple removers.

      1. Fives*

        SAME. I’ve had mine for about 15 years. Several years ago, my cube was near the copier and someone would always borrow my stuff. My beloved staple remover disappeared one day. I found it a few months later on a conference room table but slightly damaged. (It’s distinctive enough that I know it was mine.)

        I still use it but I keep it in my drawer even though I’m no longer anywhere near a copier.

        1. coffeespoons*

          YUP. I think I read this on Brunching Shuttlecocks back in the day, and I’ll probably misquote somewhat, but it’s always stuck with me: “For most people, this is the only time your workplace will ever supply you with a working finger puppet.”

          TRUE.

          1. Straight Laced Sue*

            That makes me appreciate that an old workplace actually provided me with working finger puppets.

    2. Jshaen*

      Binder clips and hanging files folders. Enough of both to last until the heat death of universe based on current usage rate.

      1. Wordnerd*

        YES hanging file folders as well. I had two different predecessors who were obsessed with printing everything, including printing out emails for their files. Hence, the many binder clips, staple removers, and hanging file folders.

        1. It's Marie - Not Maria*

          So many green hanging folders. We have been paperless for at least five years. I think they have little parties in the drawers and are breeding more folders.

          2. JustaTech*

            We’ve got mountains of green hanging folders (mostly salvaged from empty desks) but the brilliant people who built the office furniture other brilliant people purchased decided to make the filing drawers not pull out far enough to put in a hanging folder!

            That’s right, in order to file your papers in the file cabinet, which has One Job, you have to fold the pages slightly to be able to fit them in the opening.

            (Horizontal file cabinets, to be clear, not the kind that pull out 4 feet into the room.)

      2. Oh yeah, Me again*

        but the glue on the hanging file-folders dries up and they fall off their metal straps. Then you have to staple them back together. I am surprised you don’t find this a problem with your long-term hoard. Do you just staple them to start with, before putting them into service?

      1. Hannah Lee*

        My current company has a whole shelf full of boxes of paper clips.
        The buyer had ordered a box of 12 boxes of 20 paper clips. The office supply company sent a gross of 12 boxes of 20 paper clips but only billed for the amount that was ordered. And then refused to take them back. It’s been about 10 years, and that shelf is still pretty full. (20 people who do most things electronically don’t go through a lot of paper clips)

        The only problem is, the office supply company was Staples. So the main thing you see when you open the supply cabinet is a shelf filled with dozens and dozens of boxes that say “STAPLES”. So anytime anyone (including me) is doing a quick inventory of office supplies to see if we need anything, their brain shortcuts to “plenty of staples here, no need to order staples” So we repeatedly run out of actual staples.

        2. Mallory Janis Ian*

          omg the same thing happened at my office with staples. The admin tried to order a 12-pack of boxes of staples, and the company sent a gross of 12-packs of staples. So now we have a lifetime supply of them.

          1. Fiend*

            I think you both need to get these things back into the supply-and-demand chain (by donating some of the excess to second hand shops) before the technology goes obsolete some time!

        3. Fleur-de-Lis*

          Oh no! Print off a bunch of labels that say “Paper Clips” and cover up the “Staples” insignia?

        4. Elitist Semicolon*

          Now I wonder whether I used to work for your company, because my former director somehow ordered 10,000 paper clips. Amazing how much room 1,000 boxes of 100 paper clips can take up given how small an actual paper clip is.

    4. Middle Aged Lady*

      I would add green hanging file holders. Everywhere I have ever worked has scads of them. No one uses that many anymore, but it was forbidden to throw them away.
      On my last big office cleanout, we also found tons of the pink ‘while you were out’ pads to take phone messages on.

      1. College Career Counselor*

        I haven’t used those since the 90s! I have a novelty pad of those things with a slightly different message that I inherited at my first job years ago. Instead of saying “while you were out” it says “While You Were F*cking Off” which amuses me to this day. I’ve brought it with me to every subsequent job.

      2. Not today, thanks*

        I find these useful for making templates when I’m working on an embroidery project. They’re sturdy enough for a small task, cut up easily, and I don’t care if I only use them once. (Versus buying plastic templates I feel I have to keep for eternity.)

        2. StitchWitch*

          I am a seamstress at a high school, and the administration insists on giving me multiple pads of hallway passes each semester, which I never use. So I use them to make patterns, to label costumes, I even used a bunch of them to stuff a dismembered arm once…
          Now legal pads, those are another matter altogether. Those suckers are GOLD, I tell you.

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            LEEEEEGAL PADS.

            A few years ago, someone abandoned a whole pack of those suckers in our communal laundry room at our apartment. Husband secured them and we’ve used them ever since for everything from grocery lists to notes to you name it.

            We’re down to the last two, and bereft. I ordered some from Amazon, but when they came they weren’t the extra long kind.

            1. Reluctant Mezzo*

              We still have some from Staples’ immortal penny sale. You know, the one where they forgot to mention any limits. I also like the little yellow pads.

      3. SarahKay*

        At least in the UK the green hanging file folders were absurdly expensive for what they were. I remember needing to order them about 15 years ago and the cost definitely made me go “How much? I mean, seriously, how much?!?“

        1. Oh yeah, Me again*

          but unlike the Manila folders that go in the, you can save the hanging files and use them over and over, when you purge the old files (provided you staple the sleeve the metal piece goes through). I have some many years old.

          1. RedinSC*

            Oh, I white out the tag on the manilla folders and keep using them, too. Until they’re too broken to use again.

        2. goddessoftransitory*

          It’s like that with those big legal-size interoffice envelopes where I work. The kind that come with a little string to wind around the little wafer to close them, and you write the date and contents on the front in one of the slots.

          We use those to send information to all our stores, and they get gnarly quick. Covered with flour and oil, splitting along seams, you name it. Totally gross, and in most cases they’d be tossed, but it turns out these things cost a fortune. Like, as you said, a “blink and ask for a repeat of that again, please” amount. So it’s one of my occasional jobs to tape those suckers back together with packing tape and extend their harsh, harsh lives.

      4. anotherfan*

        I believe I have one of these from my salad days where the person taking the message wrote down that the Eternal General’s office had called. We have them in this office — where nobody answers the phone and we got rid of the secretary long ago.

    5. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      1) Thank you for your service in cleaning out desks- no one does this and it drives me bonkers when I take over a desk and it’s just full of….stuff. (One former coworker apparently had a pudding explode in her desk and never cleaned it up and ugh.)

      2) The last place I worked, about six months into my tenure I finally got settled enough to decide, “I’m cleaning this mofo today.” I sorted paperclips- just paperclips- for an hour. I have no idea what my predecessor did with so. many. paperclips. At first, my coworkers made fun of me and then after awhile, they were amused.

      1. Wordnerd*

        I’m one of the last people in the department from when I started here in 2016, so I ended up with that job a lot. When I did start in 2016, I started with a desk that hadn’t been cleared out when my predecessor left, and that really set the trend.
        Yeah, a few weeks ago, I spent a solid 45 minutes sorting thumbtacks from paperclips, and had a “I went to graduate school for this job” moment.

        1. Jay (no, the other one)*

          When I started a job in 1992 the office manager ordered my supplies. Mind you I’m a doctor, so there wasn’t all that much office/desk work. She ordered me boxes of everything: rubber bands (two boxes of those), paper clips, binder clips, staples, legal pads, pencils, pens (not the ones I like, of course), index cards, and probably a bunch of other things I’ve forgotten. 32 years later I still have some of the paper clips and binder clips, and I finally threw out the rubber bands a few years ago because they were dried up and useless and I hardly ever use them anyway.

          1. ICodeForFood*

            Wow… I still have some office supplies (rubber bands, a hole-puncher that my late father-in-law brought home from his office when he retired… in 1964!

        2. AnonORama*

          Ha, years and years ago another associate and I had to stay until like 2 a.m. at the law firm, putting exhibit tabs on huge binders of paper exhibits for a hearing the next day. We made up a song called “I’m so glad I went to law school,” and would occasionally sing it under our breath for the rest of the time we were both there. (I don’t really remember words or tune, because we made it up at the end of an 18-hour work day, but at least we amused ourselves.)

        3. It's Marie - Not Maria*

          I feel this in my soul. When we moved facilities, I had to inventory the office supplies for the move. All. The. Supplies. Paperclips. Staples. Rubber bands. We’ve been paperless for over five years. Still had to inventory and move them. I wrote a Masters Thesis to be able to count Rubber bands?

          1. Reluctant Mezzo*

            Have you considered doing an average per ounce and just weighing them? (on the rubber bands).

        4. goddessoftransitory*

          I’ve cleaned the cubicles at my job on many occasions, and the AMOUNT of crap that can be stuffed into them astounds me. These aren’t desks with drawers–they’re just flat table surfaces with a phone and computer/keyboard on them.

          The piles and piles of old specials notices! The layers of weird drawings tacked up everywhere! The lists of beers we haven’t sold in years! All covered in layers of crumbs, dust, and olive oil sheen.

      2. Tinkerbell*

        When I took over at my tiny one-room library, they’d been for nearly a year without a librarian. There was a mini-fridge in the back room that was basically a biohazard, and the bottom drawer of my desk was 2/3 full of Captain D’s tartar sauce packets. (There was no Captain D’s anywhere within a 20-minute drive.)

        1. Jane*

          The school library office was filled with mimiographed handouts for students when I took over in 2008

        2. Other duties as assigned*

          I work in a much bigger library than you, and my staff recently moved to a new shared office suite. I was up there making sure there was enough furniture and opened a mini-fridge to find a pack of cream cheese that expired in 2018. Then I saw salad dressing that went bad in 2016, the year I started here. THEN I saw yogurt from 2014. And creamer from 2012.

          So anyway, I told Facilities it was a biohazard and they needed to get rid of it. It’s still there, 4 months later. While my job has “other duties as assigned” I am REFUSING to make cleaning this fridge one of those duties. I told my staff to use the full size fridge in the next office suite and come to me if anyone complains.

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            People hang onto salad dressing like it’s made from angels’ tears, I swear. When I clean out the office fridge I get so many “DON’T THROW OUT MY DRESSING!” and when I check the dates it’s from six years ago. I have saved I don’t know how many lives, I swear.

        3. Festively Dressed Earl*

          There’s always a container in the break room that’s the Island of Misfit Condiments, and it’s always got some mysterious and frightening brown goo smeared on everything. If no one wanted the takeout sauce packets the first time, what makes people think they’ll come in handy five years from now?

      3. Lily C*

        I once found large, dusty box under a desk during a clean-out between staffers that had 25 unopened, one-pound bags of rubber bands.

        1. ThreeDogsInATrenchcoat*

          Were they a children’s librarian? That’s the sort of weird supply stash we end up with when we do a large volume craft for an event or take-and-make kit.

      4. Middle Aged Lady*

        When I was an office manager, a notoriously disorganized faculty member left and the boss asked me to clean out his cubicle before his replacement arrived. At the bottom of the very last drawer I cleaned out, I found a book on how to get organized. Poor guy. Super nice, great coworker—just couldn’t manage the flow of papers.

      5. Albatross*

        I took over a desk about a month ago and discovered a previous resident’s copy of MS-DOS, an Angela Lansbury aerobics VHS, and other such useful things. I’m considering trying to sell them.

        1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

          If you still have a VHS player, watch the Angela Lansbury tape- the Maintenance Phase podcast episode about it is *delightful.* (If they had ruined Angela Lansbury, I would have given up all hope.)

    6. KG*

      We have to keep a printed copy of everything and now that we receive client paperwork electronically, I’ve had to buy binder clips. It almost kills me. We were drowning in them pre-2020.

      1. It's Marie - Not Maria*

        Maybe you need to start a Trade Group with the people who have boxes of them sitting around, covered in dust?

      2. Slovenly Braid Cultist*

        I eventually realized that the reason I was buying $50 worth a month was that a certain department used them for paperwork they held for about four months, and then threw them away still clipped! I told them they had to take the clips off before dropping it in the recycling and suddenly we had plenty. the large-size ones weren’t cheap!

    7. many bells down*

      I have been office manager at my job for 5 years now and I have never had to purchase binder or paper clips. We have enough to build the Eiffel Tower. We’re a staff of 9.

      I’m reminded of an old science fiction story about how you can never find a safety pin but there’s always a million wire coathangers… because safety pins were the larval stage of some alien life-form. Then they grew into coathangers and then bicycles. “And All The Seas With Oysters” I think was the title. Anyway, can’t wait to be abducted by whatever my paperclips grow into.

      3. Seven If You Count Bad John*

        Terry Pratchett also used that concept but with grocery carts. IIRC grocery carts hatch into shopping malls?

        2. WantonSeedStitch*

          It was snow globes that hatched into shopping malls. The carts were like the worker drones.

      4. Seven If You Count Bad John*

        Funny you should mention wire coat hangers. Since there’s been a cultural shift away from those, they’re actually sort of hard to find, but the wire they’re made from is SUPER USEFUL and I do tend to hoard them when I can find a stash. They make terrific soldering picks and support structures for small sculptures and jewelry making.

        2. Wow, really?*

          I have started hating them with the fire of 1,000 suns, but can’t yet afford to get rid of every single one.

        3. Ama*

          I have a bunch hanging in my craft closet for just that reason! I have wire snips and have been known to cut pieces off any time I need wire for something.

        5. JustaTech*

          We made a set of bag hangers for the lab out of wire coat hangers – very sophisticated and high tech (but they get the job done and no one has stabbed themself yet).

        6. goddessoftransitory*

          A bent wire coat hanger unclogs sinks fantastically. I have one stored in the bathroom.

        7. Teaching teacher*

          Oh, what a sad day it was for me when I realized I had used the last of my wire hangers for a non-clothing related task. I never appreciated how lucky I was to have them… I was young, I had grown up with racks of wire hangers, why would they ever leave me?

          Recently I had a homeowner task and I had literally no idea how to do it without a wire hanger to mutilate into the shape I needed.

      5. Oh yeah, Me again*

        oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if the world was full of cheap bicycles, available wherever you got tired of walking!

      6. Kendall^2*

        There’s also a short story (I think by Pat Murphy) in which an old lady living in a SRO hotel, ducking visits by a social worker, scavenges random things off the streets every day (all the dead umbrellas here, all the random paper clips there, etc.) finds a claw thing she thinks fell off a UFO when it broke up on entry. Plot ensues. It’s pretty excellent, actually.

    9. Blarg*

      I use so many binder clips around my apartment. They close bags of chips or cereal or kale (in the fridge). They hold down tarps on the balcony. You can run them through the dishwasher. Binder clips are a wildly under-appreciated tool.

      1. No Longer Working*

        I’ve learned to put one at the top of wall calendars and hang the calendars from that – since the paper with the lunched hole is so thin, it is likely to tear.

        They are also excellent fidget toys.

      2. Moush*

        Binder clips: currently holding two comforters together as I recover from surgery and the comforters kept falling off the bed!

        1. Lynn*

          I use them to catch the corners in duvet cover that doesn’t have ties inside. Once it’s all arranged, I take them off, because it stays put.

      3. Teapot Librarian*

        I would never have thought to put binder clips in the dishwasher. I now have to reconsider my entire kitchen.

      5. TLW*

        Growing up, my dad used binder clips to attach Christmas lights to the roof. They slide right under shingles with no damage!

      6. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        Not gonna lie, I keep one in the bathroom for tweezing that annoying chin hair. It’s located such that I can’t crane my head enough to see it whether I have my glasses on or not, and the binder clip gives me more surface area to pinch with which means I’m way. more likely to succeed than if I sit there for 20 minutes and stab at the underside of my chin with tweezers.

        1. Anon of course*

          Hmmm I may need a car binder clip in addition to my car tweezers (excellent light in the car for chin hairs….)

      7. Distracted Procrastinator*

        I bought a box specifically to use with my sous vide. I use them to clip the bags to the rack and the sides of the tub.

        1. AnonORama*

          Yes! I bought all-metal ones that can go in the oven, which are fantastic for keeping parchment paper in place while baking.

      10. Dara*

        If you have something you want to display and don’t mind crimping the bottom, two binder clips upside down and stood on their ‘handles’ make quick frameless picture frames.

      11. StarTrek Nutcase*

        Yeah, I also use them to hold the edges of parchment paper up in a pan so I don’t have to grease the pan. They don’t mind oven temps and are easily washed if needed. I also use them alot when quilting. I just wish I had snatched some from the hundreds of unneeded ones from work cause especially the big ones are not cheap.

    10. Nica*

      My company recently moved after 40+ years in the same building. They determined it was cheaper and easier to donate/gift/trash most things rather than pay to move them. There were literally huge moving boxes FILLED with hanging folders, which we hadn’t used in years and were destined for the dump. It pained me to chuck them, so I made some phone calls and found a non-profit that was thrilled to take them off our hands. I must have given them over 1000 folders! Better that than going to the landfill, I guess!

      1. birb*

        In Houston there’s a place called the Texas Art Asylum that businesses donate all kinds of junk to for artists to repurpose. It’s SO much fun seeing the weird stuff that gets donated, and also all the ways people think up to use them.

      2. Colleen Whitley*

        In my scout group we keep a large bag that was donated. It gets pulled out to use when camping, and for our yearly fort-building night for the 5-7 year olds. The larger ones work great for attaching pieces of cardboard together along with sheets to build structures.

    11. MKR*

      I cleaned out a storage space when my last office moved. There were some of those orange Home Depot buckets from a prior project. I filled 2.5 of them with binder clips, for an office that at it’s largest had be 5 people (including interns).

      1. AngryOctopus*

        I’d say you should pour them out and roll around in them, but that would be kinda painful.

    12. Generic Name*

      I worked at a site that was being decommissioned. Offices and job trailers were getting cleared out before being demolished/removed. Staff had bags and bags of binder clips that they were begging everyone to take. I took a few bags home, and then when I started my new job, took the clips with me. I think the bags are still there in drawers, untouched.

      Back when everything was on paper, you needed those suckers, and it seemed like you never had just the right size. Now that everything is going digital, the clips are useless. And the supply is increasing as people scan old reports and toss paper and binder clips in a pile and the paper goes into a shredder.

      1. Annual Fun Girl*

        Binder clips might not be useful as office supplies anymore, but they are far from useless. If you have a lot, see if there is anyplace in your area that takes craft supply donations. They have a ton of uses in crafts (one example is holding fabric in place for paint/stencil/silkscreen projects). Schools also use the to display student art. I promise if you search around a bit there is someone who will give them a good home and use them every day.

        1. AngryOctopus*

          This. I don’t like to use hoops for cross stitch, and will use binder clips (stolen from my last job, natch) to secure the fabric I’m not working on. Schools, craft centers, and senior citizen centers would absolutely love to have any extra binder clips.

        2. New Jack Karyn*

          I work in Special Education; lots of stuff still has to be on paper. I love binder clips. Sharpies and paper clips, too; I’m weirdly in love with office supplies of this kind.

          But I wanted to put in a word of defense for the binder clip.

    13. TootsNYC*

      oh my lord, the binder clips.
      We used them for our routing packets, and somehow I got confused about how many were in a box/case, and ordered way too many. then someone else ordered a stash. And I started removing them from the files before I sent them off to storage/destruction.

      Honestly my company should never need to order binder clips again.

      1. Crushed Dreams*

        At an old job, we were going nuts trying to find binder clips – they would walk off like break-room donuts – so the boss decided to order a large quantity from our university vendor – enough to stock us up for a good while. And they took FOREVER to arrive. We were so excited when they finally showed up, we couldn’t wait to tear open the boxes up and revel in our binder clip bounty, Scrooge McDuck style. I remember thinking they were rather inefficiently packed – such small boxes, they could surely only be a few in each one – but what the hell. And surely, given the size of the box, we’d only gotten part of our long-delayed shipment. But who cares? We finally had binder clips!

        Except…bossman must not have read the fine print when he ordered, because when I excitedly opened the first box, I discovered the tiniest binder clips I have ever seen. Like straight-up BossBabe Barbie office desk accessory sized micro-clips. They were so small that they stapler-refill-sized box I assumed only contained a handful of clips actually held something like 20 of them.

        I remember just standing there staring into the box with the utter stunned silence of someone whose dreams have been suddenly and irrevocably crushed by cruel fate…then showing him (to much the same effect)…before we both absolutely lost our shit and dissolved into laughter.

        To this day I have NO idea what on earth you could even use clips that small to hold, or why our vendor even carried such an absolutely useless size. They were so tiny that manipulating the wee little handles was nearly impossible. The clips ended up being something of an office joke after that, and I think I actually still have a few at home. But seriously. WTAF office-supply-vendor?

    14. LuckyPurpleSocks*

      Oh my gosh, we just cleaned/organized a supply closed at my work and we also found SO MANY BINDER CLIPS! We kept one container of each size, and I’m going to “disappear” the rest of them.

    15. Sometimes I Wonder*

      I do have one weird use for binder clips…to fix the toilet. That metal arm that is activated by the handle, when it rusts out and loses the chain? Binder clip it together until you can get a new handle assembly in there. I’ve had a binder clip on that handle for more than 3 months, waiting for the landlord to fix it.

      1. Csethiro Ceredin*

        Ha, very Macgyver!

        I have four in my kitchen which I use to clip down the edges of the paper lining a baking pan. Because they’re metal they do fine in the oven (but make sure not to forget and touch them afterwards).

        And occasionally I use one to stand a piece of paper up under my monitor (triangular metal part as the stand and the paper between the two wire loops) if it’s something I want to be sure to notice as I leave – like TAKE GROCERIES IN FRIDGE HOME or whatever.

        1. Oh yeah, Me again*

          Hah! This second on is inspired! You could use old file folders cut to size to make the notices (nicer than printer paper held up by Scotch tape, but still temporary) Cut the folder into 8.5 by 11 sheets with that disused paper cutter and run then through the bypass feed on you printer or copier then cut them down to size, attach the binder clips, and voila! Cute little standing sign!

      2. Reluctant Mezzo*

        Hooking them on with paper clips works, too (uncoil the paper clip and use as a standard wire thingy).

    17. Artemesia*

      I brought a bunch of the big binder clips home when I retired as they make excellent closures for chip bags, cat food bags etc.

    19. Office Chinchilla*

      During the pandemic, my company decided to give up the lease on our old office space and move us into a smaller space (since we all now WFH a few days a week), so one of my first tasks back was to clear the old office out. The new space was not only smaller, but the company had decided we would be “paper-free” (not literally possible, but we could get close). I started by posting things on my Buy Nothing Group. “Anyone want some tabs for hanging folders? Just the little plastic tabs? You could use a few? GREAT! Here’s 8 boxes of 500. ENJOY!”

      Eventually someone in my group put me in touch with a local charity that put out an email blast to all the other charities in my area. I had multiple people say “I’ll take everything you’ve got!” and then show up and realize we had way more than they could possibly transport. Still, a lot of stuff got to good homes, and I am pleased because my company’s plan was to just throw everything away.

      The things I kept include: floppy disks (I call them my “retirement fund”), a label maker where you turn the head and squeeze out one letter at a time, and cellophane sheets for projectors. It’s my Museum of Outdated Technology. Oh, and our dolly. I was fiercely protective of that. It still has the pin!

      1. WellRed*

        This is what I did. Local group that collects and gas “shopping” warehouse for teachers. Bulletin boards, binders, everything.

        1. Office Chinchilla*

          I’ll never forget the teacher who told me, her eyes tearing up, “you don’t understand. We have to beg for PENS.” And here I was, showing her really nice stuff and telling her to take as much as she wanted because my company considered it worthless.

          At the last minute, the company decided they also didn’t want a bunch of electronics (mostly monitors, nothing that stored information) and a coworker found me a charity that collects electronics to distribute to other charities. They showed up with a big moving truck and still had to leave some behind because they didn’t have room.

      2. JustaTech*

        When we cleared out several labs there was just tons of lab supplies (holders and racks and small equipment) that we had a million too many of, but the idea of throwing it away was just a non-starter.
        So people asked around and we had a teacher from a high school show up to take “all” the lab supplies. We filled his car until it literally sank on the wheels and we were afraid it wouldn’t be able to roll anymore, and barely made a dent.

    20. Maggie*

      I used to work in a library. NOTHING got thrown out. Obsolete book labels with dried out adhesive, typewriters, old tech, 3 ring binders that were used but still “good,” boxes of old Date Due slips, yellowed plastic sleeves for protecting vinyl records, VHS cases, if it has been used in a library in the last 50 years, we had half a box of it in the supply room. When we moved into a new building someone suggested purging old stuff. You’d think she suggested we all amputate a limb. “WHAT IF WE NEED IT?!”

      1. Maggie*

        That said, when my mom found an old ZIP disk with family photos stored on it, I was able to go into the tech office and get a portable ZIP drive and cables, no problem. I offered to bring it back the next day, but the department manager said “Keep it. We’ve got about 30 of them.”

    21. Ally McBeal*

      I’ve accidentally accumulated so many binder clips over my career that I now use them as chip clips in my pantry. Or any other food packaging that needs to be clamped closed to preserve freshness. Maybe they’ll clamp my coffin closed with my collection someday XD

    22. commensally*

      If you buy the cheap staplers at most office supply places, you’re likely to get a free staple remover packaged with them. The staplers break, the staple removers don’t. We have a drawer full. (Binder clips actually get used up here though.)

    23. Gumby*

      I don’t steal them from work (and I think our supply office has a normal number of them) but could definitely use excess binder clips at home. I use them to keep things like cereal bags and frozen fruit / veggie bags closed. So even though I stocked the junk drawer with at least 24 of the little buggers I still run out on the regular.

    24. Risky Biscuits*

      To add another (non-work) use for binder clips that I didn’t see mentioned yet: I used to have guinea pigs and they lived in a large cage that I built them out of cubical wire shelving panels and coroplast (“C&C,” a popular style for guinea pig enthusiasts) and I used binder clips to secure some of the panels, especially ones that needed to stay put but still be easily removed when needed, like the ceiling panel that hosted the “fleece forest.” I also used binder clips to secure the fleece bedding the lined the entire bottom of the cage to the coroplast. Lots of binder clips, so there were no gaps big enough for those little potatoes to pull the fleece loose and climb under.

      (Typing all that out made me suddenly realize how much of a DIY hobby guinea pigs can be.)

      1. CowWhisperer*

        I worked at Home Depot when my kid was small after teaching high school science for years.

        I’d get a call from a confused coworker that a customer was asking for chloroplasts.

        I’d reply, “If they’re looking for a plastic board, it’s in aisle 32 by the plexi and glass supplies. If they’re looking for plants, we’ve got a garden section – but there’s a plant at pet shops that works much better. But they’re never looking for the plants – so just take’em to the far end of 32.”

    25. CowWhisperer*

      You can make good money showing up with those at a local secondary school the week before school starts and selling them for 4/$1.00 for the clips and $2.00 a pop for the staple removers.

      Love,

      Teacher who forgets to put office supplies on her grocery list

    26. Teaching teacher*

      I just read this whole section of comments and didn’t see this testament to the usefulness of binder clips – charger cord holders! My unplugged cords never hit the ground because they are held up by binder clips – pull the metal wings off, put the cord through, then connect the clip back together and clip to desk.

    28. All Hail Queen Sally*

      When my hair was longer, I used the large binder clips as a hair clip. They worked great.

    29. ElliottRook*

      To be fair, I have stopped buying plastic chip clips because they ALWAYS break in less than a year, and I close up all chip bags (and freezer bags, and cracker packages, and cereal bags in boxes) with binder clips. Hashtag life hack haha.

    30. Mother of Corgis*

      At a former job, we had such a huge supply of binder clips in various sizes that I made a series of action figures out of them for my cubicle.

  5. Your Social Work Friend*

    The paper shredder. We are the only school in the entire district who still had one instead of using a shredding service for disposing of documents with student information on them. Ethel the shredder has died. We still have no shredding service.

    3. Brain the Brian*

      My office uses a shredding service, but we still have a shredder because some people don’t trust the service. *insert eyeroll here*

      1. Lenora Rose*

        Never mind keeping the shredder for fear of the shredding service, one of my coworkers *hand tears* all her papers into tiny bits before she puts them in the shredding box.

      1. Artemesia*

        We have a public one a couple of times a year; we are shredding boxes of old tax records this week.

      2. AngryOctopus*

        All my previous jobs in industry have had large plastic bins (like trash bins) where you can slide in any documents that require shredding. The company takes them away a few times a year and just mass shreds the contents. I use them to shred personal documents I don’t need anymore–old tax returns, bills, etc. (most people here use it for that, we rarely have non-online confidential/business use only paper floating around).

        1. New Jack Karyn*

          I think they have trucks that do the shredding right there in the street? I could be wrong. But I think I saw one on fire one time, right in the middle of a busy downtown street.

          It looked kinda like a garbage truck but with some machinery that wasn’t a compactor.

          1. Shred it!*

            They do. Our service pulls into the parking lot, rolls the giant bins outside, truck picks it up and dumps it and you can hear it shredding. Very cool.

      3. Potoooooooo*

        The one I interact with semi-regularly at work looks like a box truck, but has a hidden arm like the a garbage truck uses to pick up trash and dump it in the top. It’s probably the same mechanism.

        The shredders inside the trucks can even destroy hard drives.

      4. Reluctant Mezzo*

        There’s a nice document destruction place in our town (they do mailing services and other stuff like that). I had a bunch of old tax stuff I wanted destroyed and so happily paid a dollar a pound to go through Igor (I could see it from the front. I suspect they just threw everything in, envelope and all).

    5. Maestra*

      I wish we had used a shredding service. I work with IEPs and the office shredded is the slowest thing in the world and always clogs.

      You’d think in one of the largest districts in the state we’d move past a machine that jams all the time.

      1. Brain the Brian*

        Big district = admin is so far removed from the day-to-day that they don’t understand how these little annoyances add up.

      2. Former professor*

        As a new faculty member, I suffered with a terrible shredder (could handle like 3 pages at a time, jammed, overheated) for several years before saying to my department chair “I honestly think that shredder is a fire hazard. Is there any chance we have budget for a new one?”. The next week we had a massive, modern, industrial quality one. Apparently the 40+ department members had only ever groused about this to each other and no one had ever mentioned to to the chair that we needed a new shredder in the decade since its useful life had ended.

    6. Oh yeah, Me again*

      it is more reliable to shred on-site. .y colleague found checks and other papers floating around our parking lot on at least one occasion after the shedder bin was picked up. And I trust myself and my coworkers not to root through for valuable data more than I do the anonymous employees of the shredder company. I guess they are bonded, but still.

    7. Ace in the Hole*

      Our version of this is the manual hole punch. It’s been rescued from the trash countless times.

      We have an electric one that does three/two hole punch for letter size paper… but if you need to do a non-standard spacing of holes, you need Ol’ Punchy.

    1. profe*

      My department has an electric hole punch taken from another department that said “please rid us of this big useless thing”. We all love it.

      1. coachfitz13*

        +1 for the electric hole punch–absolutely priceless in my previous job where the boss received an inch-thick binder every night that held everything he needed for what was going on the next day.

    2. Pretty as a Princess*

      My kingdom for an electric stapler!

      When I am reviewing long documents – technical report drafts, federal policy – I can’t do it digitally. I just can’t. I need to be able to take notes in margins, fold corners, highlight, etc. It hurts my eyes and my head to scroll through pages and pages on screens. I came close to buying my own electric stapler when I learned that the one in our mailroom went away during the pandemic shutdowns.

      1. Ally McBeal*

        I don’t like electric staplers (they’re finicky and easy to break, in my experience) but I agree wholeheartedly with needing to print out long documents. Most things I can handle digitally, but when my friend needs a beta reader for their novel, you better believe I’m printing it out – in tiny font with small margins to save paper & ink, but still. Then I’m covering the manuscript with post-it notes. Bliss.

      2. Academic Social Worker*

        100% agree with printing out long documents! I need to be able to highlight, sticky note things, sometimes even draw on them. It’s just not the same.

      1. Jay (no, the other one)*

        I remember those from HS when I was always in charge of copying and collating for the theater department. The copy machine was in the main office. I spent hours there copying, collating, and stapling. They had a manual collating maching – you loaded the papers in top to bottom, pulled the lever, and it spit out one copy of each page (when it worked). I was a junior when they got a copier that collated and I thought it was The FUTURE. It was 1977.

    4. Just Moi*

      Ooooo. I miss the one in our office. It sat right next to the electric pencil sharpener – bought by the same coworker who loved her some power tools.

    6. Mim*

      Oh god, I absolutely hate ours! I’m sure I’d grow to appreciate it if I still had a job that required a lot of stapling. But our electric stapler is so, IDK, *violent*. I swear I can feel my soul shake when that thing gets set off. You remember that feeling as a little kid, worrying that the frenzied goats at the petting zoo were going to take off one of your fingers as you tried to feed them? That is what I feel like “feeding” our electric stapler.

      1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        They make new ones that are smooth and delightful. I used to be terrified of the one at the non-profit I worked at. Now? I bought one on clearance at Wal-Mart and even if we only use it once a year for insurance documents, it’s going to be a lifesaver.

    7. TootsNYC*

      my least-favorite thing about electric staplers is that they don’t staple at a 45-degree angle. So the staples end up pulling out of multipage documents that people flip through often.

    8. Homeburger*

      We have 2 electric staplers. Neither has been operational in the nearly 7 years I’ve worked here. But they remain on the supply counter. We’ve had I think 4 different employees in charge of office supplies in that time but for some reason no one gets rid of it.

    9. Ama*

      We did not have an electric one but the heavy duty stapler we had when I worked in a grad school (capable of stapling up to 2 inch thick documents) was the only office supply in my entire career that I resorted to labeling “If found return to Ama’s desk.” Since it was a grad school the students were always needing to staple thesis chapters for the faculty and they would carry it off all the time — and then I would need it to staple something and it would be nowhere. (They were welcome to use it they just needed to bring it back.)

    10. Distracted Procrastinator*

      One of my jobs involved a lot of stapling. I was there two weeks before I requested an electric stapler. It made things so much easier. I couldn’t believe the people in the job before me hadn’t already asked for one.

  7. Bitsy*

    I’d started working at an office that had seemed pretty functional so far. But I figure that The Weirdness always shows up eventually.

    One day I opened a drawer at the public service desk and found it full of broken staplers. I asked my supervisor why we had a drawer full of broken staplers? We’re saving them until we can get them fixed, she said. By whom, I wondered? A travelling stapler repairman?

    Over the next year, one by one I threw them away. Nobody noticed or cared.

    Now when I finally see the way a particular organization is quirky I think, yup, there it is: The Drawer of Broken Staplers.

      2. Abogado Avocado*

        I once worked at a legal services non-profit with the Obstacle Course of Dead Fax Machines. Our office manager was a genius at squeezing the lowest price out of vendors, but that was coupled with the inability to discard any broken item just in case it could be repaired and used again — hence, the Obstacle Course.

        These were early fax machines, larger than today’s printers, and the vendor who serviced the office machines told me no one was making critical parts for them. So, when a fax machine died, it was discarded on the floor in the common area (sometimes right in front of the entrances to individual offices) and people just walked around it. This happened throughout the office. Meanwhile, the federal and state court systems switched to electronic filing, so we no longer needed a bank of fax machines — let alone several dead ones — to file pleadings.

        Despite this, the Obstacle Course remained — until one day our fair city announced a free electronics recycling program. At which point, I and a paralegal loaded the dead fax machines into my car when no one else was around and took them to the recycling center.

        It took about a week for anyone to notice that the Obstacle Course of Dead Fax Machines had disappeared. When asked directly, I fessed up that I had taken the broken machines to the free city recycling program. Use of the word “free” diverted all from the fact that I hadn’t gotten advance approval and, next, I took to metal recycling the Hand Truck with One Plastic Wheel.

        1. Generic Name*

          This sounds like something my old office would have done. It drove me crazy that they treated all common areas as dumping grounds for office supplies, cleaning supplies, equipment, etc. It was so embarrassing to bring guests/clients to the office. There was a broken air compressor shoved in a corner. Costco packs of toilet paper stacked in hallways outside of restrooms. Broken chairs gathered together in a pack. The kicker was that the layout of the office was custom-designed just for us by some “space planner” that the owner of the company was friends with. But she didn’t include closets. She also left tons and tons of dead/open space that had no function. One of the restrooms was so oddly shaped that one of the stalls was rendered non-functional because the stall door was meant to be angled such a way that the door touched the toilet when closed. The two-stall bathroom was functionally a one-stall bathroom. And this was the “main/nice” bathroom that guests would use when in the building for meetings. Ha ha ha

    2. Kimmy Schmidt*

      My library has a display shelf of old, broken staplers that we absolutely cannot get rid of for Reasons! I have asked about these Reasons, had it explained to me probably 4 or 5 times now, nodded along knowingly, and them promptly forgot said reason (“reason”).

      1. Bitsy*

        Kimmy, The Drawer of Broken Staplers was also in a library. I doubt you’re surprised. :-)

    4. Rage*

      I “fixed” a broken stapler at my previous employer (all I did was take a pair of needle-nose pliers and pull out the 5 or so staples that had somehow become crammed into the…what do you call the part of the stapler where they staples come out? That thing).

      The CEO called me a “Level Six Stapler Fixer” and I wanted to list that as my title so bad.

      1. metadata minion*

        When I worked at the front desk with the staplers, my very favorite tool was a pair of curve-nosed pliers; *perfect* for getting staples out.

      2. Ace in the Hole*

        Level six is so specific. It makes me wonder what the qualifications are for level seven.

    5. Oh yeah, Me again*

      What a shame! A drawer full of broken staplers sounds like an artwork waiting to happen. (I saw a nativity set made out of old house/car/luggage/padlock keys once. . . .)

    6. Ally McBeal*

      I once worked in the box office of a respected regional theater. My boss married for the first time in his mid-50s, and when his wife moved in she asked him why he had two dozen tuxedos (not suits – full tuxedos) when he only wears a tux once a year for our big gala. He proceeded to wear a tux to work every day for the next 2-3 weeks to prove a point. They were on a home declutter-and-remodel show and he gave several of them away in the end.

      RIP Stephen, you kept us smiling even when our patrons were unreasonable.

    7. Mostly Managing*

      I started a new job just over a month ago, and inherited a desk with office supplies already in it. Ok, not a problem – I’d need most of those things anyway.

      I have a Drawer of Plastic Tubes Formerly Known as Pens.

      They look like pens, but none of them actually works.
      I have a pen of my own which I use, but every so often it likes to hide under my keyboard. I pull out what might be a pen from the drawer and … no ink.
      My current theory is that someone was saving them all so they wouldn’t end up in landfill.
      They are slowly being binned

      1. JustaTech*

        When I started at my job I got stuck babysitting an instrument for several hours that didn’t really need attention, but if you left it alone, bad things would happen.
        I didn’t have a laptop, so I was quickly bored. To entertain myself I got every single pen in the lab and tested to see if it was working, and threw out the dead ones.
        Then I started on the lab markers.
        Then I tested all the lab markers to make sure they were *actually* alcohol-resistant. (About half of them were not, so I labeled them.)

        My coworkers were very grateful!

      2. Zelda*

        When I was in grad school and serving as a TA, I prided myself on giving students lots of usable feedback on the papers I graded, not just a few numbers and a grade. I worked hard, wrote a *lot* on those papers, and emptied quite a few purple gel pens. I still have the plastic tubes formerly known as pens. They’re *trophies*, darnit.

  8. DisneyChannelThis*

    Clickable pens. Office provides the cheapest bic ones with caps and only in black ink. No one likes them. Everyone brings their own pens in. People start “accidentally” walking off with the home brought pens. People start hoarding what vendor pens we get.

    1. AngryOctopus*

      People stole my pens a lot at an old job, until I got one which was a giant plastic daisy on the top. It must have been from a vendor (because I didn’t bring in my own things at that time), but that’s quite A Choice for the vendor. It lasted a few years and when I left the job I gave it to the boss’s 6 year old.

    2. run mad; don't faint*

      My husband’s office had a limited number of extra fine-tip black pens. He always kept his in his pocket because it would disappear if he left it on his desk.

      1. Ainsley Hayes*

        Periodically, I search on eBay to see if anyone has listed a box of the PaperMate Accountant Extra Fine ballpoint pens. Those were the BEST pens ever. Sigh …..

    3. Ama*

      Yup, when I purchased office supplies the big boss was the kind of guy who would throw a fit that if we spent more than 20.00 on pens in our supply order but went out and bought a several thousand dollar Persian rug for our conference room instead of the $800 multipurpose rug I had sourced. But he only looked at the total of the line item, so I would buy a few boxes of the terrible bic ones (total $5.00) and one six pack package of the really good clickable gel pens that the admin staff actually liked (also total $5.00). Every time I bought a pack I’d keep two and give two each to my two colleagues so we could actually take notes, sign forms, etc., without the pen malfunctioning on us.

    4. Lemonfork*

      I just remembered I have a pack of clicky pens hoarded in my drawer that I’ve forgotten to open.

    5. Coverage Associate*

      I also worked at a place with the cheapest possible pens. They were actually like the seconds of the cheapest possible pens. They weren’t even straight. I brought in some really not special branded ballpoint pens from one of my spouse’s events that got canceled. I slipped them into the supply cupboard and watched as they became a hot item among all the administrative staff.

    6. Pizza Rat*

      I feel your pain there. My pens go back in my backpack and home with me every night. The cheapies the office supplies are awful.

    7. Lenora Rose*

      When I was in charge of supplies briefly I have to admit, we ordered the NICE pens for the office; one type I liked and one type the person in charge of a particular sub department demanded. We’re only talking $21 to $25 for 12, not bank breaking. And in some new colours if the colour mix was the same cost (ie, on sale!) since I knew for a fact one person used purple whenever she could. They went fast the first couple of times, then started to sit there for a more normal duration as people realised, “hey, we don’t have to hoard.” and there was a fair bit of goodwill made.

      I noticed that since I left that role, that department went back to a cheaper kind of pen. Not the cheapest ones not the hard plastic with the edges, but still nowhere near as nice. I wonder if the hoarding of the better ones has started up again.

      And the person who orders supplies in my current department will get me the ink refills for my extant pen, at least though I don’t think she’d buy me the same kind as new pens while we have pens around.

    8. Just Here for the Llama Grooming*

      I worked in the primary office in a BigLaw firm for years, and then moved to a much smaller satellite office. The mothership used to buy Signo gel pens, then stopped (too expensive). The satellite office never stopped buying them. So until I retired I sent/carried a few Signos to someone I worked with regularly back at the mothership.

  9. Amber Rose*

    It’s such a cliche but… staplers. We have cupboards full of staples, that’s fine, but no staplers anywhere. The office manager buys them and they vanish before they get seen.

    Pens, but that’s largely just me. Every so often, a giant box of company brand pens shows up in the supplies room and I just grab handfuls and hoard them like a Pen Dragon.

      1. Beancounter Eric*

        No, the Swingline 747, in red. I have one on my desk, my personal unit – a gift from my wife. I also have a perfectly good company-provided 747, but no, I will always use the red one.

        And if Lumberg takes my stapler, or moves me to the basement so I can’t watch the squirrels, I will burn the place down. :-)

        1. Tom R*

          many years ago I had a job as an EA and I had a corporate credit card. My Boss told me I could spend extra on a good stapler because a good stapler will follow your career so I bought myself a Red Swingline Stapler that I still have

          1. Beancounter Eric*

            In all seriousness, the Swingline 747 is nearly indestructable. Another good one is the Ace Pilot 404…..all steel, and nearly indestructable.

          2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

            One boss asked me if I wanted a new stapler- I said yes, in pink. The other boss said no, that was ridiculous.

            Guess who got a pink stapler?

            1. Kivrin*

              OMG I just realized that this stapler I stole from a job I had in 1993 (who had clearly stolen it from somewhere else because it has an Ontario govt logo on it) is a Swingline 747 lol.

              1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

                Boss One came back from Staples or Office Depot with a nice breast cancer awareness month pink stapler. He plunked it down on my desk with aplomb, just to irritate Other Boss.

        2. GeeGee*

          I have the Swingline Compact in purple in my home office! I work from home remotely so my supplies don’t get swiped.

          When I was in my old office, my metal ruler was “borrowed” all the time. I finally put my name on the cork backing. That seemed to have solved the problem. :)

          1. AngryOctopus*

            I cannot tell you the number of times I find my lab things (pipets, mostly) on other people’s benches. It has my name on it! I know you took it!!

            1. JustaTech*

              I had a lab boss who was so proud of having his own lab, and so tired of everything growing legs and wandering off that he insisted that *all* our lab supplies had to be blue, to go with his name. Every size of tube rack, the water bath floaters, the pipettes, everything. And if it didn’t come in blue then we had to buy it in green (for his PI’s name).

              It actually worked out well in our shared lab, because not only was it obvious when the other lab borrowed our stuff, it was also obvious if we borrowed their stuff!

          2. dawbs*

            I have a ruler that has my name on it–one of those personalized “Dawbs’s ruler” that grandma found somewhere (personalized stuff was always cool to kids and if she saw all of the grandkids’ names spelled right on something she could buy personalized, she bought all of us one :).

            My kid stole it and took it to school for her math class where she kept being asked why it said “Dawbs’s ruler” and gave it back to me in a huff …and stole her dad’s ruler instead.

            Personalized FTW. :P

        3. Winstonian*

          I have the exact same one. It was the first thing I got when I started at my new job because my stupid old job wouldn’t let me take it (TBF they did buy it, lol). This way I know who has it if it goes missing.

        4. Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet)*

          I ended up with an office-purchased red Swingline because I sent the office manager that Office Space meme when requesting a better quality stapler. I work in a very paper-heavy industry and I had an Amazon Basics one that jammed regularly and couldn’t handle more than 6 pages. It’s my favorite.

      2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        After I left last job, I stole my office stapler because it was a matched set to the Swingline my dad took from HIS job at the post office when he retired. They both look like they were made in the 40’s and they both still work like a dream.

      4. Anonynon*

        I’ve got myself a 767 with a faux wood grain that I happened upon when they stuck me in an ancient, smelly, grad student office with no windows. I got moved within a week and you better believe that stapler came with.

        1. Audogs*

          I have the same one that has moved with me cross country and several jobs. It is currently not working and I am distraught..

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            Try a sewing machine repair place. They’re quite good at fiddly little things!

      5. NerdyPrettyThings*

        Yes! I just checked mine out to see – I knew it was a Swingline, but not what model. It is indeed a 767. I also just discovered that it features, written in silver sharpie, the name of the person who I replaced 21 years ago.

      6. NerdyPrettyThings*

        I just turned mine over to see what kind it is. Not only is it indeed a Swingline 767, it features, written in silver sharpie, the name of the person I replaced 21 years ago. It still looks and functions like it’s brand new.

    2. Kris*

      We struggle to keep a working heavy duty stapler. We do have a collection of broken heavy duty staplers, though. Maybe we’re the problem!

      1. Merci Dee*

        I keep a heavy-duty, high capacity stapler on my desk because we create packets of information as part of our asset settlement process. Some of the packets are smaller, but our large machinery purchases or building remodels create pretty substantial packets. Occasionally, people from other departments will ask if they can borrow my high capacity stapler, and I’m always happy to lend it out. But I tell them that I will chase them down if they don’t bring it back, because I stole that stapler from the mail room area fair and square 10+ years ago, and nobody’s going to steal it from me if I can help it. :)

    3. Kerry*

      We had a vanishing scissors problem until a teen employee burst out laughing when an order of new scissors came in. He apparently was hiding all the scissors in the ceiling tiles!

      1. Shellfish Constable*

        That’s…disturbing. Were they arming the rodents in the attic? Stashing them for the zombie apocalypse? Mad at management for taking their red stapler?

        1. New Jack Karyn*

          I assume he was just being a goofy teen, thinking he was being playful and prankish, without realizing he was causing actual problems.

    5. Not today, thanks*

      I have an Arrow 202 stapler from back before zip codes were invented (going by the address emblazoned on the bottom: Brooklyn 6, NY). It’s been chugging along for at least 60 years at this point.

      1. Beancounter Eric*

        Perhaps longer – seemingly, that model was introduced in the 1930’s.

        Sadly, Arrow no longer catalogs it on their website.

    6. Oh yeah, Me again*

      Stapler, I think, go away to breed in private. Monday. . .two staplers. in the workroom. Tuesday, one stapler. Wednesday, no staplers. Thursday, one stapler. Friday, four staplers!

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        I can hear the David Attenborough narration: “Here we see, in the semi darkness, the male stapler quietly approach the female, careful not to startle her. He bears a full box of staples as a courting gift to this lovely creature, her Swingline 767 logo gleaming in the moonlight as she edges closer to him.”

  10. Offline*

    I replaced someone who had spent their entire career in our workplace, so they admittedly worked through the normalization of the web in office settings. Our work requires a lot of information resources. When the retiree came in to meet me, they showed me shelves – SHELVES – worth of printed off PDFs from current and past subscriptions (a questionably permittable activity based on access licenses) and talked to me about how important it was to retain these because “you just never know when the internet will go away”

    2. Hermione Danger*

      I would argue that if the internet goes away, you’ll probably have bigger problems than the content stored on those shelves can solve.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        The Internet may not go away short of massive societal collapse, but any given site may well vanish. Link rot is a real thing. (This is an argument for saving local copies, not for printing everything out!)

        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          This! But as someone who works on websites, there’s no guarantee your local copy will be accurate more much past when you download it.

    5. pally*

      That was me for several years. Not out of fear of the Internet going away, but because our external hard drives often DID “go away” (i.e., crash). And the boss who managed our IT was not an IT guy. Too cheap to hire in someone to do things properly.

      Back-ups? Yes! He said everything was backed up (“Trust me!”). Only, no one could ever discover where all our files were backed up to-even our IT guy.

      I learned, after the first loss of all my data, to make paper copies of everything. Which came in handy, time and time again. **Pally weeps.**

      We’re better now. The company has joined the 21st century and we have professional IT managing things. Said IT boss retired. No more fear of data loss. Have chucked the paper copies.

      1. Artemesia*

        Decades ago I had an SPSS manual for data analysis. It was written by a genius in communication and you could not only USE the methods but it carefully showed you what data was best analyzed, how to present findings, etc. It was like a stat brain between cardboard covers. Then they came out with a new updated one and so I threw the old one away. The new one was useless; written by monkeys with typewriters (who went on later to write my Kia electric car manual). For years I tried to find one of those old manuals. I didn’t do data analysis every day and so might be a bit rusty when doing a new analysis and that old manual made it all clear again. Curses on non-tech writers writing tech manuals. It is a gift.

      2. Dancing Otter*

        My first adult job, they used huge reel-to-reel tapes for data storage. (This was long enough ago that they were only ten years or so obsolete.) The head of Data Processing was even more out of date than his precious tapes.

        First, women were not allowed in the Data Processing room. Static from nylons, horrors! I don’t know who he thought was cleaning the place every night.

        He was convinced that the cost of the tapes was THE most important consideration. After he printed the general ledger history for the year on tractor-feed green bar paper, he … this hurts to write even decades later … re-used the tape. No backup except the printed transaction history and trial balance. Credit where it’s due, one copy did go to secure storage, but you can all see where the story’s going, right?

        The auditors arrive. We can’t make them too comfortable; we want them to go away ASAP. So, junior auditor tracing transactions, ticking and tying, and generally trying to work at a desk about the size I had in middle school, balances the ledger binder on the paper basket.

        Now, best practices would have been everything locked up in the audit trunk overnight, but this was a very junior auditor. He left for the night without putting away the binder. Without, in fact, even putting it on the top of the desk.

        The engagement manager and the CFO spent the next morning going through all the dumpsters in the basement of a 30+ story office tower. We never saw that auditor again, but I blame that cheapskate DP manager far more.

    7. Generic Name*

      I replaced someone who did this! This was about 20 years ago, and the person who had the job before me was in their 30s. There were binders and binders of websites printed out. The sites were for things that changed with some frequency, so the printouts quickly became out of date. So dumb.

      1. Ama*

        Me too! It was actually the woman who hired me, who left in my first year on the job. A few years later we moved offices and I had to clean out the massive file cabinet full of mostly completely outdated info she had printed out and saved in her 10 years on the job. There were a handful of things I saved for our archives and a few other things I scanned and saved to our electronic files because it was correspondence we didn’t have another copy of but probably 90% of it just got shredded.

    8. Donkey Hotey*

      Ayup. Engineers at my old office had an entire 4′ x 8′ bookshelf full of old catalogs. When I pointed out that not only were those catalogs 20 years out of date, but that half the companies had gone out of business, the engineer replied that it was to provide cross references. Specifically, that our in house drawings referenced Maker X’s part #123, but Maker X had been bought by Maker Y, who absorbed inventory but part #123 was now part X123, and on and on for two decades of mergers and acquisitions. Never mind the fact that we’re talking about standardized fasteners, so nothing that couldn’t be resolved by searching for the standard.

      1. AFac*

        I admit to keeping old catalogs. They were organized by item type, so if you weren’t sure what the name was of what you wanted, you could leaf through the section until you found it. There were multiple items on a page, so you could more easily compare them without clicking back and forth between 2 webpages. People wrote notes in the margins for others (“this flange doesn’t quite fit on our rotogravure even though it says it should”).

        I am one of those people who has a better memory for things I see on paper than on the internet. I don’t really know why, but I think it has something to do with being able to physically hold something and the fact that the context of the thing doesn’t change on the printed page (e.g. a sentence half-way down a page will always be half-way down a printed page but may vary for internet pages depending on window size).

    9. Putting the Dys in Dysfunction*

      Imagine if the Wayback Machine was endless warehouses filled with PDFs, continually refreshed as the content changed.

    10. ICodeForFood*

      To go against the trend here… in the 1990s, I worked in a purchasing department, purchasing printed materials for an insurance company… things like return envelopes, checks, various and sundry forms that were needed for the business.

      1. ICodeForFood*

        Sigh… hit return to soon. Anyway, there was a computerized inventory system which was supposed to hold the history for each item ordered and inventoried. It was unreliable.
        I started a binder with a photocopy of each purchase order for each item I ordered. Eventually, it grew to be an entire shelf of binders… and the inventory guys, who used the unreliable automated system, would call me and ask me to check my records for what had been ordered, since they didn’t trust their system!

    11. Zephy*

      They aren’t wrong, honestly. Hard-copy archiving has become more important than ever as so much information moves into the cloud. Future historians are going to have a hell of a time with this era of human history – tons of media has already been lost because it only ever existed digitally and wasn’t or couldn’t be preserved in a forwards-compatible format (like paper). See: Flash games and cartoons from the early 2000s. If they didn’t get ported to Steam or another console-based format, or pivot to Youtube videos, they’re gone forever. Maybe the websites hosting them still exist but you can’t play the games or watch the toons anymore.

      1. Artemesia*

        The tapes of the first words said on the moon were erased so the tapes could be re-used.

        I have photos of my grandmother who died in the 1919 epidemic holding my 6 week old father. I can guarantee you that no picture of me holding my 6 week old grandson will survive in digital format without there being a hard copy.

        When I retired I threw out boxes of floppies, hard discs, and assorted data storage devices all of which had become obsolete and largely unreadable — and all those VHS tapes. Electronic storage is ephemeral. If it is really important make a hard copy. It is why in our family we do shutterfly printed books of family pictures every so often. Those like the picture of my grandmother might be around for 100 years.

      2. beep beep*

        Not that tons of media still wasn’t lost, but community projects like Flashpoint made efforts to save all those old games and animations, and many were. It’s fun to look through their catalogue as a walk down memory lane.

      3. Been There*

        I learned the other day there is no recording of George Orwell speaking, even though he worked for the BBC as a radio maker for years. All those tapes are just… lost.

      4. Nico Robin*

        I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future, this era is considered a dark age. Not because of anything that has gone on, but because so little information about this time will survive.

    12. Pizza Rat*

      “you just never know when the internet will go away”

      I saw that in an Outer Limits episode in the nineties. I’m betting this person saw the same thing and internalized it a bit too much.

    13. Lena*

      Before my two coworkers and I worked here, there were two women who worked in over office for 30 and 32 years each. So many printed out websites, such as a list of all suburbs in the city and the post codes, contact details for all these businesses, pamphlets for places that had closed.They moved offices in that time too and never threw anything out by the looks of it.

    14. allathian*

      My office’s downsizing because so many of us still WFH most of the time. I had to give up my desk, which I totally understand because I only use it once a week or so. We also cleared out a closet full of paper files that my coworker’s predecessor had printed out. We figured that since we hadn’t needed them for 10 years, we wouldn’t need them in the future either.

      My former coworker printed everything out because she preferred to read stuff on paper when she could. Looking at a screen all day gave her eyestrain.

  11. Brain the Brian*

    We have an old spiral binding machine that must be from 1987 or so. Every time someone tries to suggest throwing it away (because, ya know, we haven’t actually produced anything requiring spiral binding in well over a decade), the VP who used to manage publications swoops in a decrees that We Must Keep This Because We Might Someday Need To Reprint A Page In An Old Document That Was Originally Spiral-Bound And This Cannot Be Accomplished Without A Spiral Binding Machine. Right now, it’s sitting unplugged on an HVAC unit — where it has been since at least 2018.

    1. Annual Fun Girl*

      I came to say Spiral Binder, except with a twist — new staff always wants to throw it out (or doesn’t know what it is) but our grant writer actually uses it 2 – 3 times a year and our ability to spiral bind in house does apparently save us a few hundred dollars a year. Now the spiral binder is in a cloth storage bag in the grant writer’s office with a big note explaining what it is.

      1. JR 17*

        What does your grant writer use a spiral binder for?? I’ve never seen a grant that wasn’t submitted electronically! But I do remember spiral binders from my early consulting days, almost 20 years ago. It is very satisfying to produce a bound report with a plastic cover – PDFs aren’t quite the same.

        1. Curious*

          At my place, there are certain reports, grants, RFPs that are submitted and received in spiral binders.

          No one wants throw spiral binder maker thingy away because replacing it may be expensive should it be thrown away and somebody needs it.

        2. Enough*

          I have a cookbook that is spiral bound and worked in the 80s where reports were spiral bound. Love how everything lays flat. Makes it so much easier to read. Especially when it’s an inch or more think.

          1. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

            I love my spiral bound Sunset Easy Basics cookbook. My mom gave it to me many yeas ago when I moved out and I still use it regularly.

          2. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

            I bought a spiral binder a few years ago to use at home for some project I’ve since forgotten. I don’t remember if it ever got used for that purpose, but I have used it a ton to bind loose recipes. I made copies of all my most-used recipes from all my cookbooks and spiral bound it into a greatest hits cookbook and it is the best thing ever for the kitchen.

          3. Charlotte Lucas*

            Love spiral-binding for anything (cookbooks, craft books) that needs to lie flat.

        3. crochetislife*

          I work on RFPs for bidding purposes in construction. Some public entities and even private clients still prefer physical copies and doing public openings for state regulatory reasons. I also have a spiral binding machine that i use maybe five times a year for a public bid. I mostly use it to have physical copies of our proposals if i want to visually see the different deliverables we’ve sent in the past or if i don’t feel like staring at the computer for hours on end.

        4. Brain the Brian*

          If we used it for this purpose, I could understand keeping it. But I think the last department to stop using it used it solely to bind final versions of the annual updates to their internal policy manuals. The binding signified that it was “official” and any deviations from it needed one-time approvals until the department’s director produced the next “bound official” revision. No other department did this, ever, and any public-facing documents bound with this ancient device long predate my employment here. The whole thing is sitcom-level ridiculous.

    2. used to be a tester*

      Ooooh – if I ever found one laying about, I’d ‘borrow’ it so I could spiral bind some of my craft books and cookbooks so they’d lay flat while I was using them. I’m seriously considering taking a few crochet books to a copy shop and paying to have them spiral bound just because it vexes me so much.

      1. FricketyFrack*

        Oh my gosh, I never thought about that, but that’s genius! My boss bought me this book of beautiful embroidery patterns, but it’s SO HARD to copy. I’m going to cut the binding off and have it rebound so I can actually make use of it.

        1. Oh yeah, Me again*

          what about cutting out the pages and putting them into plastic sleeves in a 3-ring binder? It will take up more space, but you can put in multiple brochures (with tabs to separate) and you won’t lose any of the page to the spiral binding. And who doesn’t have zillions of old binders lying around.

          1. FricketyFrack*

            Surprisingly, I have zero binders, and I’d prefer not to use a bunch of plastic to do it. The book in question has a good amount of margin around each pattern, so binding wouldn’t be an issue.

      2. Brain the Brian*

        Do you want one that may or may not be surreptitiously snuck out of an office in the dead of night? *shifty eyes*

      3. Jen*

        I took my favorite knitting book to the copy shop and had them slice off the binding and spiral bind it. I love it SOOO much.

      4. Angstrom*

        Same with music books. Wrestling with something that doesn’t lie flat in a music stand is aggravation nobody needs.

        1. Brain the Brian*

          I grew up a musician and completely agree! But we do not deal with music at all in my office. (In fact, even listening to it is banned.)

        2. Galadriel's Garden*

          I used to play in an orchestra where all of our music was provided to us either comb or spiral-bound, and it made basically every other configuration unbearable. When I worked at at civil engineering firm years later, which still relied heavily upon printed and bound materials for plan sets and RFPs, I would spend my lull periods binding basically every last bit of sheet music I could manage…

      5. Retired and missing free office supplies*

        Use binder clips (see most of these comments for sources) to hold the books open on both sides.

      6. Funbud*

        In my retirement job at a nonprofit thrift store, we have had at least two spiral binding machines donated. We also got boxes and boxes of binding combs. All of it sold eventually. My advice is ask around at your local thrift stores.

    3. Pretty as a Princess*

      We have one in a satellite office and my colleague uses it all the time and may be the only one using it. She will bind together key sets of documents for specific projects she is working – like me she benefits from the tactile aspects of paper reading, highlighting, scribbling notes etc. When customers come to call and there’s a beautiful briefing deck from a research team, their faces LIGHT UP when they ask if they can have print copies and we hand over beautifully bound materials.

      She’s the only one who uses it, but the supplies keep getting used by her so the office manager keeps ordering them. I love it.

    4. AdminExtra*

      I love a spiral binding machine! I worked with one probably twenty years ago and still reminisce about it when I print out something that’s too big for a binder clip. But now that I think about it’s rare that I print anything so long, which is probably why those machines have gone out of style.

    5. bishbah*

      Should this unlikely scenario ever occur, tell the VP that your local copy/print shop will do the spiral binding for you for a small fee.

      This reminds me of people who pay for storage units that they fill with things they never use and yet can’t bring themselves to get rid of. Sure, maybe if you sell everything now you might someday have to repurchase an item, but in the meantime you haven’t been burdened by the cost of storing/maintaining all that extra stuff.

      Also, now I’m curious if my own office still has their spiral binder. It was shoved way back in a cabinet last I saw it, years ago, but I think that after shutdown the office manager did a massive purge prior to the office reopening. The fax machine is now gone, for instance…

      1. Brain the Brian*

        And that local copy/print shop’s fee will almost certainly be far less than the value of the labor that will be wasted when an employee has to learn how to use our in-house spiral binding machine.

        (This assumes our machine still works. It may not, seeing as it’s been unplugged for at leasy five years.)

    7. Statler von Waldorf*

      My current office has a spiral binding machine, which hadn’t been used in years before I started. These days all our bids and quotes are PDFs.

      It turns out they work fantastically for my homebrew D&D campaign notes. Space is tight behind the DM screen, and spiral bound notes keep everything in order and keep my notes from spreading out. Plus, at the end of the campaign I have a nice notebook as a souvenir of the game.

      1. Usurper Cranberries*

        That’s a fantastic idea! I’ve been seriously considering going back to paper DM notes because there’s something about the tactile feel of paper and pen when playing that I love. (I already use physical dice instead of a dice roller whenever possible, as it’s just more fun.)

    8. Nea*

      I have a big metal manual spiral binder left over from the pre-internet fanzine days and I. Still. Use. It.

      I’ve made books for classes with it; printed out readings in the front; note pages in the back. I’ve made calendars with it. I’ve made specialized trip booklets with maps and notes with it. I’ve made personal cookbooks with it. If I stuff any more printed notes and info into my copy of Daily Dracula, I’m going to rebind it with my trusty spiral binder.

      And yes – I do have a lot of old fanfiction bound with it!

      1. pandop*

        I work in a library, you will prise the spiral binder out of our book repair unit’s cold dead hands.

      2. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

        This inspired me to go on Amazon to see how much they actually cost. I’ve been wanting to make my own calendars (using my own photos) for years! Cheap ones available for $39-$49!

    9. FashionablyEvil*

      I used to use my office’s spiral binder when I would start a new workout program–I would put the calendar on the front and then bind all my tracking worksheets. I LOVED it.

      1. Brain the Brian*

        An employee a couple of years ago asked if they could use ours to bind some personal documents into a booklet, and management sent out a passive-aggressive office-wide email reminding everyone of the No Company Resources For Personal Use policy as a response. Great system we have here.

    11. urguncle*

      My partner is a composer and has to bind scores frequently for applications to grants, etc, so we *own a spiral binding machine.*
      Yes, it does feel good to live someone’s dream.

      1. Brain the Brian*

        If yours ever breaks, I know where to find one… just not how to sneak it out of here!

      2. LikesToSwear*

        I volunteer for various science fiction conventions and frequently do all the pre-printing creation of the publications. There are several machines that I would happily buy for my hobby if I had the money and space. A spiral binding machine is one of those things. I did manage to buy a large format printer from my husband’s employer via a government-ish public auction site (they called it a plotter, but it’s not a true plotter with the pens etc, it’s a huge inkjet).

      3. Bread Crimes*

        This thread is teaching me that I desperately want a spiral binding machine. Mostly to use on all the pretty notebooks I don’t buy because I hate writing in a book that doesn’t lie flat properly at each page, and so few NICE notebooks with good, fountain-pen-suitable paper come with a spiral binding.

    12. Office Chinchilla*

      When we were moving out of our old office, we found boxes and boxes of spiral-binding supplies. My coworker wanted them, but only if she could also get a spiral-binding machine. Since we never did find a machine, we gave the supplies to a charity that already had one.

      Of note: We had only moved into the old office three or four years before we moved out. Someone packed up all of these supplies and moved them from the old-old office, but without a machine.

    13. NerdyPrettyThings*

      Yes!! I naively suggested that we get rid of ours when we needed room for a new piece of equipment. The fervor of the resounding “NO” was almost a little alarming. I’ve worked here for seven years and have never seen anyone use it.

      1. Brain the Brian*

        I’m reminded of the story of the IT specialist who unplugged the fax machine to prove that no one used it. That one is a CLASSIC.

      3. Brain the Brian*

        I am reminded of the IT specialist in one of these threads who proved that no one was using the fax machine by surreptitiously unplugging it. CLASSIC.

    14. WantonSeedStitch*

      Oh boy, this is giving me flashbacks to the comb binding machine we had for binding sales demo books at my old, horrible job almost 20 years ago. Jeez. I didn’t realize that would still make me twitch. Weirdly, it wasn’t a part of the job that I hated, but it was such a characteristic task that it really brought me back there for a second.

    15. CatMouse*

      When I worked for an engineering consultant traffic impact studies had to be provided in digital and spiral bound print format (in case the public wantes to see them in regards to the city, and for the client to wave around at meetings).

      Though to be fair, we only had a machine that cut the holes, I had to put the coils in by hand

    16. a.n.o.n.*

      i spiral bound large print outs for my own use until we went remote during covid, and i miss it :(

    17. Hydrangea McDuff*

      I can definitely tell you that you can manually “un bind” a spiral binding and then easily re-bind it.

  12. Annika Hansen*

    I have worked at a university for 25 years. I started taking my scissors with me from position to position. They started buying these scissors that were cheap and barely cut. Mine could be used as a weapon. I don’t even need scissors that often. If anyone needs to borrow my scissors, I always make sure I get them back. I work hybrid now so I cannot guard my scissors so closely, but so far I still have them in my desk.

      1. coffeespoons*

        I also work at a university, and also inherited a pair of glorious, old-school, all-metal scissors when I was hired over a decade ago. I’ve had five different workstations in three different jobs since then, and you bet those scissors have moved with me every single time. They cut everything and something about the combination of the sound and the physical sensory experience of using them is unmatched by any of the lesser plastic-handled cousins that were supplied to my co-workers. I will never give them up!

    3. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      I took a job as admin support in a university department. My new coworker told me to mark my supplies with my name, because students and faculty borrow things. They use them across the hall in the lab and they never make it back. I had two awesome highlighters for 15 years, traveled to three jobs with my name taped to them. Still do that with scissors, staplers, tape dispensers. Do I look a wee bit loony? Maybe, but I’m not the one looking for office supplies.

      2. coachfitz13*

        My previous EA had a stapler on her desk that she had labeled with a paint pen “Stolen From [her full name]” to make sure no one took it.

        2. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

          I put “Theft is unbecoming of a medical professional. Leave the stapler here.” on mine, and we went from buying 9 staplers a year to buying 0.

      3. Artemesia*

        I’d have a lockable ‘pencil box’ storage box for this stuff if I worked in a place like that and keep it in a locked drawer.

    4. Karma is My Boyfriend and so is Travis Kelce*

      10 months into my new job and I finally received my own pair of scissors. It was like asking to move mountains.

      1. AngryOctopus*

        My previous lab was full of scissors that were TERRIBLE. Used to cut blots and never rinsed so the mechanism was always rusted shut. Then we got a few pairs of new beautiful scissors. I hid mine and wrote my name on them in three different places. I wish I had taken them with me when I left. They were so nice.

    5. Dasein9 (he/him)*

      The all-steel ones with black handles? Yeah, those are gold.

      I worked in a library in the aughts and was the person who ordered supplies. There was a hurricane on the way and we had a lot of shelves near windows, so my department was tasked with covering the books with plastic. The next week, I got a lot of requests for scissors, and added them to the supply order.

      I suspect the originals are still to this day on the tops of the shelves of books that we covered with plastic.

      (I also got yelled at because our department spent more on supplies than any other. Yes, we did. Those security strips that go inside the books to prevent theft cost 13 cents each back in those days and we processed scores of books a day.)

        1. Enough*

          Just looked for them. Found a site selling industrial scissors, 10 inches, nickel plated for $45.

        2. She of Many Hats*

          There’s a reason why sewers/crafters threaten severe bodily if an authorized person uses their scissors or if they are not returned immediately…A good scissors that holds it’s edge and fits your hand is a treasure!

          1. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

            All of my crafting scissors have been labeled with threats to anyone who uses them for other than their intended purpose. I also bought a couple dozen pairs of cheap scissors and scattered them in drawers around the house so nobody better have an excuse to go into my sewing box and take my fabric shears. It works 99% of the time.

          2. zinzarin*

            I have two pairs of scissors in my utility drawer at home. The cheapies for everything and the good ones that I keep in a plastic baggie so they don’t get used accidentally.

          3. Shermit*

            My partner thinks I bought him left handed scissors out love (I am right handed). Really I did it to keep him away from my craft scissors. I look at it as a win-win.

            1. Project maniac-ger*

              I had someone steal my left- handed scissors once. My only solace is that their hand probably cramped up using them. Justice.

          4. Susie Occasionally Fun*

            When I was around 6 I borrowed my mom’s fiskar fabric shears and forgot them in an outside playhouse, where they rusted shut. Mom died when I was 49 and for 43 years she regularly reminded me of my transgression. Other children might have done drugs, committed arson, or drove drunk. But none of them committed the cardinal sin of ruining my mom’s fiskars.

            1. CatMouse*

              I made my husband buy me a replacement pair of fiskar fabric shears when he borrowed mine (to cut fabric) and also left them outside. After buying a new pair, he won’t go near them!

              1. JustaTech*

                Early in my parent’s marriage my dad borrowed my mom’s fabric scissors to cut sandpaper.
                They managed to get through that, we had a great pair of “office” scissors, and no one ever took the fabric scissors out of the sewing room.

          5. Distracted Procrastinator*

            Yes, Ma’am. My scissors are guarded and my children were carefully taught Not To Use The Fabric Scissors. Unfortunately, my husband’s mother did not teach him this rule. That resulted in a scissor upgrade from the plastic handled Fiskars he ruined to all steel Ginghers. He didn’t do it again, though.

      2. Annika Hansen*

        Yes, those are the ones! When I started, many people had them in their desks. I think some people took them when they retired because within 5 years of starting there, they became hard to find. The replacement scissors sucked.

    6. Jackalope*

      I have an extra layer of possessiveness to that because at some point someone in my office purchased a handful of nice left-handed scissors that work really well. I was one of (as far as I know) only 2 people in my office who was a lefty when I found this supply (I told the other lefty so he could have functional scissors as well). This is the one office supply that you wouldn’t get from me unless you tore it out of my cold dead hands. I am especially possessive because I’ve had times in the past when I’ve had to stop people from tossing left-handed supplies (usually scissors, sometimes other stuff) because they tried them out, thought they were useless, and didn’t bother to imagine why someone else might find them useful. (I’ve also gotten, “Oh, we got rid of the left-handed equipment because we didn’t think anyone would need it.” Seriously, it’s TWO pairs of scissors/whatever in the whole supply cabinet, leave it there. We’re 10% of the population, so someone will need it at some point!)

      1. Putting the Dys in Dysfunction*

        Left-handed, but couldn’t imagine trying to use a left-handed scissors.

        OTOH a school exam chair with a writing surface that folded down from the left side instead of the right would have been worth its weight in gold.

      2. LeftyMom*

        My daughter is left handed and has an IEP for a number of conditions. She’s now a senior in high school but getting left handed scissors was harder than virtually everything else for all 13 years of school. We gave up on her high school art class and bought our own since the school couldn’t provide them for months and her AW teacher did all her cutting and we found it absurd that she was spending time in that instead of helping kids learn.

    7. PurplePartridge*

      I also had a personal pair of scissors at a job where scissors were for some reason hard to come by. We had a production station that was well stocked and had an actual paper cutter, but it was a floor down and across the hall so I often leant mine out when someone on our floor needed them. I absolutely sharpied my name with “do not steal” on them.

    8. Kyrielle*

      I started a job once and got all the usual office supplies except scissors. I was told if I needed them frequently I could request them and they’d be provided. I thought about it a few seconds, shrugged and said thanks, and didn’t request scissors.

      I had to borrow the admin’s scissors every so often – and you bet she knew who had them until they came back – but mostly I didn’t need scissors. And then they restructured and got rid of the admin and I had no idea where to get any scissors, because seriously, there were no scissors.

      I didn’t need them badly enough to source a pair, so I’m going with “we really didn’t need scissors” anyway, but at the time it bothered me and I can’t articulate why.

    9. many bells down*

      I’m a lefty so I made sure to get special lefty scissors. It worked in my college costume design classes – I was the only person whose scissors didn’t get stolen.
      The problem is that people pick them up and wander off with them before realizing they’re “weird” scissors, so I find them stashed in random spots.

      1. TootsNYC*

        label the “left-handed” and maybe people will leave them where they are. And any other lefty will be glad to know of them.

    10. Begonia*

      I strongly considered taking the scissors with me when I left a job a few years ago, they were the best ever. I still sometimes regret not doing it.

    11. zuzu*

      Yes! If you get a good pair of scissors, you must hang onto them.

      I may have liberated my scissors from my last job.

    12. Catabouda*

      I have a good stapler. I got a second stapler, the newer ones they order now, and THAT was the one I let folks borrow. My good stapler went home with me when we went remote. Now that we are hybrid, it’s still home with me and I still have to replace the stapler on my in person work desk every few months because they wander off.

      So – get another set of scissors and only lend those out.

    13. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

      Someone stole my good scissors from my desk where I work! No idea where they went or who took them (or why–everyone supposedly had their own). I had to get new ones ordered, because I actually do use mine pretty frequently.

      I swear though, in my house, scissors disappear more than anything else. I used to buy a new pair every December just so I had some for wrapping presents.

      Though what’s crazier is when my husband’s grandmother passed away and we were helping his parents clear out her house, there were no fewer than 30 different pairs of scissors tucked into pretty much anywhere you could fit a pair of scissors. Her main hobby was quilting, so it made sense she’d want to have scissors handy, but I told my husband that this must be where everyone’s scissors disappear to. I took like 10 of them to our house so that I wouldn’t need to buy any anymore.

      1. Possum's Mom*

        My brother the carpenter, who owns every tool imaginable, lived across the street from a cheap hardware store. One summer, when his wife decided it was time for them to clean and sort his workshop (their garage), they discovered 32 hammers of various types and weights scattered throughout shelves , drawers and sometimes still in their original packaging. That along with 5 more inside the house. It was easier for their kids to go across the street and buy one when they wanted to use one, rather than walk out to the garage chaos for a free hammer.

      2. CM*

        This will be my house when I die. Nobody else in my family is capable of putting scissors back where they found them, and I think they eat them or hand them out to friends or something, so once or twice a year I buy a multi-pack from Costco and stick one in every drawer, pencil holder, and supply box that I can find. They continue to disappear, but at least I can find one when I need one.

      3. Azure Jane Lunatic*

        I got a bunch of boxes of craft stuff from a retired teacher/girl scout leader’s family, and there were so many scissors in there. I have spread them throughout the house and there are still plenty in the box downstairs in my craft room. (Unfortunately very few of them were the Good Scissors.)

        I have my fabric shears on my sewing machine desk, but my best scissors were a random dollar store purchase with weirdly high-quality nimble blades. They stay in my desk drawer at home and nobody touches them but me.

        When my daughter went off to college I sent her a few essentials including a pair of scissors. She didn’t understand why I sent them until she needed to use them and they were there.

    14. Oh yeah, Me again*

      Put those scissors in your briefcase/tote bag and carry them home daily! The extra weight is worth the security of knowing they will not go missing for good on one of your work-from-home days! (Or a locked drawer.)

      1. Possum's Mom*

        I used to tell my coworkers (all women) to store their valuable tools in an empty tampon box in their desk. Never lost track of scissors, etc. after that!

  13. Emby*

    my boss is obsessed with every member of their team having their own printer. nevermind that we’re only in the office once a week, have access to the general printers, and rarely ever print anything. we switched to hoteling and boss is trying to figure out how everyone can keep their individual printers.

    1. Wilbur*

      I’m in engineering, for some reason one of the old timers is adamant we hang on to a large format printer. I haven’t seen anyone use it in the last 5 years, and we have a printing service in the building. I’m not even sure how to print from it, it has to be 20 years old.

      My old boss was adamant that everyone keep their desktop computer for 3d modeling and simulation work. My laptop has always handled both just fine. I don’t think I’ve turned on my desktop in years and it’s not hooked up to a monitor anymore.

    2. Not my coffee*

      My boss would not allow me to have a $70 individual printer because they wanted to save the company money. Given the number of people who have individual printers, this feels petty and personal. We are a small company but our annual budget is $1.5 million USD.

      1. Not on board*

        To be fair, those $70 printers are expensive to run – the cheaper the machine, the more it costs to use. And they’re disposable because they’re not worth fixing when they break, so very environmentally unfriendly.

        1. OldHat*

          Would suggest that it’s better to rent printers than buy them. Easier to service and you are less out of luck when a part dies or the world repeats its supply of yellow ink cartridges of a certain shape with a specific chip. At least died ones can be used for parts for the company that rents them out. That’s slightly better than completely being sent to the landfill.

      2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        Printers are a loss leader for ink. The selling price of a printer is all but meaningless.

    3. Not on board*

      Not to mention that the small printers are much more expensive to print on – far better to have a big centralized printer or 2 that costs like a penny a page to print on vs anywhere from 10cents to a dollar per page.

  14. ChemistryChick*

    My company will Absolutely Not purchase anymore three ring binders because “we have plenty left over!” …except they’re all 4″ binders and ridiculous to use for equipment manuals/documentation that only need a 0.5″ binder at most.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      Wish you could give them to an exec with a ten page document and a “put it in a binder, Boss!”

    2. Industry Behemoth*

      I wish people would return smaller binders for reuse after they no longer need them!

    4. bishbah*

      On the flip side, our office was swimming in 1” and 2” binders after we digitized all of our files circa 2019. (Which turned out to be excellent timing, enabling us to work from home a year later.) I sincerely hope our office manager found a good home for the binders and didn’t just toss them, but after a short while they were all gone.

    5. Jennifer C.*

      My office refused to buy 3-ring binders because we already had a ton of them in a closet. But the binders in the closet were old, dirty, and torn. I needed the binders to put court exhibits in and then take them to court and pass them out to people. No one saw any problem with me having to give a judge an exhibit binder with mysterious stains on it. I bought my own binders and hid them in my office.

  15. Dust Bunny*

    I’m honestly surprised at how not-sacred office supplies are here. We don’t waste them because a lot of ours are archival and thus expensive (relatively speaking, for office supplies) but beyond just using them responsibly nobody seems to care. We also don’t use much beyond pencils, acid-free paper, and good erasers (the white ones in the blue card sheaths). When they got us new furniture they offered desks, with drawers, as opposed to tables and nobody wanted them because we don’t actually use the drawers. I just have a pencil cup and a small dish for my erasers and a few binder clips.

    At my previous job it was pens. Always pens. People were absolutely ferocious about their favorite kind of pen.

    1. Enough*

      Love those erasers. Used them since college years and got my first one when I was taking my drafting classes. That,s all I bought my kids when they were is school.

    2. Blue highlighters*

      Ok also an archivist and I have to hide my good erasers. Student employees kept walking off with them for awhile.

      I also hide the acid free scrapbook tape (we use it to mend boxes) because again, it kept disappearing.

      The thing in our office is that we have literally hundreds of blue highlighters that were bought in 2016 when a coworker and I both stated we liked that color the most within earshot of the person in charge of office supplies. We don’t actually use highlighters that often, so I’m pretty sure that stash will outlast me.

      1. Usurper Cranberries*

        I did not know I needed acid free scrapbook tape until now, but now that I know it exists, I can think of so many times it would have been handy…

    3. Peep*

      Also an archivist, and I hide my good eraser. I have a cup with my favorite pencils, pens, mechanical pencils, and microspatula. I also hide my stash of hot pink post-it notes because orange and hot pink show up best on boxes. I also have a bowl for barely used gloves. >.> My desk also has coveted desk things that get passed down from previous employees — I have to keep an eye on my glass bok choy and Wells Fargo snake bank, otherwise someone’s going to liberate them.

  16. HigherEdSurvivor*

    We had BOXES of those old rubber finger condoms that are used for counting money, despite it being an administrative office that did not handle money, or paper files, or anything of the sort. By the time I was the office manager and in charge of the supplies, they were disintegrating and took an entire shelf unit in our very cramped supply room.

    I took them to the trash/recycling right outside our suite at the end of my work day (I was the last to leave) and arrived to them back in the supply closet the next morning. There was an all office nastygram about being wasteful from the Assistant Director who forbade that anyone gets rid of them.

    I slowly threw out a handful a day until there was only a single mostly empty box left by the time I left. The Assistant Director never noticed.

    2. Hedgehug*

      Oh my goodness, I only have 2 of them at my desk and could use more. Mail me some! Not the disintegrating ones though, haha

    3. TootSweet*

      I found out that these are great for separating coffee filters! I confess to taking one home and leaving in the package of filters so that I can get just one first thing in the morning when I’m still bleary-eyed.

    4. FreakInTheExcelSheets*

      Are they the ones about the weight of cheap latex gloves or the nicer heavier rubber ones? I use the rubber kind to protect my fingertips when embroidering.

    5. Chicago Anon*

      One of my brothers used to call those “rat rubbers,” which caught on in my family. I learned the hard way not to use that term among outsiders!

  17. colorful umbrella*

    When I was a student aide, I had to make copies of large documents for staff members. They were often paperclipped in a folder, and I had to remove the paperclips to make the copy. One guy had colorful paperclips instead of the standard metal, and was so freaking territorial about them. If I was doing several at one, I would occasionally forget to re-paper clip the original of one before putting it back into the folder, and he would come after me to collect his paperclip. Not because the document needed to be paperclipped again (it didn’t, that was just to make it easier for me to transport a bunch at once) but because he didn’t want to lose a single one of his colorful paperclips. I was 18 at the time and had no sense of norms so it didn’t strike me how strange this was until years later.

    1. Siege*

      When we moved, the admin staff found out that our office had been hoarding paper clips. I think they found upwards of 20,000 paperclips, ranging from standard metal to shaped styles.

      We will never use 20,000 paperclips. The sun will go cold first.

      1. FricketyFrack*

        We had the same thing when my office moved! It was an entire state department, but each division had their own supplies, which was really not that efficient for the basics, so when we were packing, we had everyone bring all of their supplies to a conference room and then sorted through it all. There were easily enough paperclips to last about 20 years. Everyone was notified that there was a (basically permanent) moratorium on buying ANY paperclips.

      2. Mim*

        I used to be an admin assistant at a law firm, and part of the process of closing out a case and preparing the physical file for being stowed away was removing all the binder clips and paperclips. For the most part it was a self-replenishing system, because I needed a steady stream of clips to provide for incoming stuff, but I would save the non-standard “fancy” clips either for my own needs at work or to carefully dole out only to the people who would most deserve and appreciate the tiny joy of receiving a wad of boring discovery held by a purple polka dotted clip.

        Haha, I did not have the space to hoard thousands of clips.

  18. Retired Govt Auditor*

    We had forms that we had to complete daily to charge hours to specific audits or other activities. Our secretary decided to put the pads of these forms in a locked cabinet because she said we were going through them too fast. They were pre-printed on both sides so they wouldn’t even have been good scratch paper.

  19. Siege*

    Bullhorns. (They do have a use in the 21st century.) We have four … unless one’s been borrowed by a local/left in someone’s car/has dead batteries/got loaned out to another organization … Half the staff act like the bullhorns are sacred idols and the other have act like they’d leave them on public transit if they were mildly inconvenient to carry. We spend a surprising amount of time figuring out where the bullhorns are, and you can’t just buy more; they’re $75 a throw, which kind of is more than you want to pay for something people seem to see as the equivalent of dinner mints.

    1. No bullhorns here*

      Oh jeez. We actually had to ban bullhorns because of an incident involving a well-meaning security guard trying to organize a group of students. A guy in uniform *in a Holocaust museum* sorting people (“you go to the left, you go to the right”) is…not a way to make visitors feel welcome.

      3. SLG*

        Um. I just gasped out loud at my desk. Probably completely well intended on that guy’s part and also … No.

  20. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    Fine roller-ball pens, in a variety of colors.

    We used to do sequential edits of documents when doing proposals (these were monstrous, hundreds or thousands of pages, for the Pentagon). One person for technical stuff, the next for branding & consistency, a third for close copy-editing. We did these in sequence, on paper, so that whoever was typing it back into WordPerfect (yes, I’m old) could tell who wrote what, based on the color of pen, in case something was ineligible. And sometimes we had to write a lot by hand, so the fine and ultra-fine widths were preferred.

    Sure, red and green and blue are usually easy to get. But somebody in facilities ordered a couple boxes of light purple (might have even been freebies), and people would go through every supply cabinet in the place, late at night, in order to find them and see if there were other cool colors that nobody knew about.

    1. Cyborg Llama Horde*

      I used to have to make surveillance camera layouts. By the time I left we were cutting costs on the cameras and didn’t care as much about total coverage (and also I was much better at doing the layouts), but when I started, I’d use colored roller-ball pens and highlighters for the field of view, to make sure we had total coverage. I’d print out a map of the area on ledger-sized paper, add the camera locations, and fill in the field of view. If we needed to adjust some cameras, I’d use a different color of pen and highlighter for revisions.

      I liked (still like) the needle tips, but usually had to settle for very fine for the best colors.

      One year I found a reasonably-priced 24 or 48 box of deep purple needle tips on our usual office supply vendor, for about the same price as the blue and black ones, and those were my signature pens for YEARS. (It’s possible that some of the ones I have now are still from that batch, though I’d guess I’ve gone through the ones I took home.)

      1. Enough*

        I used green ink while in college. Saved me once. We had to submit paperwork each week to insure we would be allowed dorm visitation by the opposite sex on the weekend. I slept late and didn’t get it in. But the administrator in charge was sure he had seen my green filled out form and called me to give them a new copy.

    2. TootSweet*

      Off topic, but I have to say there’s one thing I miss about WordPerfect: reveal codes. Word doesn’t have anything comparable. *sigh*

      1. Richard Hershberger*

        WordPerfect is still available and fully supported as a modern office suite. And yes, it still has reveal codes. My office still uses it routinely. Is it suitable for you? It depends on how and how much you exchange files with other offices. If you only send straightforward documents with no fancy formatting, and you aren’t doing rounds of edits with outsiders, you can simply save the file as a Word file and it is fine.

        1. zuzu*

          I remember when we had to give up on WordPerfect at my law firm because our clients all used Word.

          Lawyers all over had the sads over that. It made editing documents so much harder.

      2. Oh yeah, Me again*

        Oh gosh! Me too! I’ve whined about that for the past 30 years (“But you can make MSword look just like WordPerfect!” they would always say. But, not!) Also, using the function keys with ctrl, alt, etc! Much faster than taking your hand off the keyboard to use the mouse and drop-down menus.

        1. Pipe Organ Guy*

          We used WordPerfect at our church for the weekly service booklet (anywhere from 28 to 40 pages, depending on complexity of that Sunday’s services and how much music there was). If push came to shove, I could have made Word look nearly as good as WordPerfect, but WordPerfect was easier and I could position things very precisely on the page. I could squeeze things, too, when that could make the difference between having everything on 28 pages versus having a 29th page needing a whole sheet of paper. Yay for Reveal Codes! I retired and my successor uses Adobe InDesign. I like the look I got in WordPerfect better.

            1. Windsorite*

              If it’s the full liturgy plus scripture readings *plus* sheet music (not just lyrics) it’s not that hard to get up there on the page count!

      4. Whoaitsme*

        Word has the ability to show some of the formatting codes including tab characters, paragraph marks, spaces, hidden text, optional hyphens and object anchors. BUT WordPerfect’s “reveal codes” feature is far richer and much more useful.

        1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

          My mom’s typesetter back in the 1970s and only had a visible screen that was 2 lines. SW equivalent of WordPerfect reveal codes allowed her formatting that I have never been able to achieve in MS Word. Her output sheet had to go into a BW photo developer and was hung to dry. Then she cut and did the layout on a light table.
          I used version 3.0 and 3.1 of WordPerfect in the early ’80s. Still have a set of install discs, but no system to load them with.

    3. Csethiro Ceredin*

      I foolishly bought sale purple pens with the supplies many years ago and people were FERAL about them. There were tears, hoarding episodes, people stalking the supply company’s website to see if they were available again, and over the top accusations – it was really one of those learning moments for me when I realized sometimes people just act in a way you could never see coming.

      I kept one after it was dry simply because I and the few others who remember that will laugh every time we see it.

    4. Zelda*

      Not me, sneaking around the office after everyone has left, seeing if anyone has two or more purple dry-erase markers. Now, I am an honorable person, and I would *never* take anyone’s last purple dry-erase marker. But maybe, if they already have *two* purple dry-erase markers…

  21. Richard Hershberger*

    My stint working in a biglaw firm convinced me I never wanted to do that again, but to their credit they didn’t worry about office supplies. They had multiple supply cupboards that were amply stocked with all the routine stuff, and were open to anyone. You just went to the cupboard and got your file folders or whatever. This showed understanding that having someone whose time is billable shouldn’t have to waste time chasing down the authorization to get more sticky notes. It is almost as if someone in a position of authority gave the matter three to five minutes of thought, rather than indulging in a reflexive reaction to a line item on a budget spreadsheet.

    1. zuzu*

      One thing Biglaw did right was have ample exhibit tabs available at all times, lettered or numbered, and the lettered tabs even went up into the double-letter range.

      Made those late-night affidavit and appendix assembly projects a lot easier back in the day.

    2. Your Mate in Oz*

      My boss still does that. We’re engineers but the same principle applies. He’s semi-retired but I guess he likes shopping? There’s everything from batteries to bulldog clips to the coloured printer paper one of the admin people likes to print IMPORTANT NOTICES on.

      The one problem is that no matter how many whiteboard markers he buys we never have any*. I am sure someone eats them.

      (* well, each whiteboard will have one, mostly-empty, usually black ink, marker. If you want whiteboard makers you tour the desks in the open plan office and usually there will be working markers on desks where there are no whiteboards)

  22. archangelsgirl*

    Some things you will still find in classrooms
    filmstrips (projectors all gone)
    slides (ditto)
    cassette tapes (ibid)
    overhead sheets and markers (no projectors)
    encyclopedias
    novel sets from the 50s, 60s, 70s…
    the novel studies that go with them… I still know teachers teaching Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Cay, etc.
    nonfiction books discarded from the library, but hey, the misinformation “might come in handy” in the classroom
    I’m a teacher. I’ve tried to discard all of these at various times in my career only to be told by a colleague they might come in handy.

    2. Richard Hershberger*

      I have not read Island of the Blue Dolphins since I was a kid, but going from distant memory I don’t see why it would still be a cromulent book for a class. Or has the Racism Fairy gotten to it in the interim? Now I don’t want to reread it, as it might join the list of unspeakable books I loved in my youth.

      1. Cyborg Llama Horde*

        My recollection is that it isn’t actively BAD, but if I were putting together a curriculum today I’d probably go for something by an actual indigenous author.

      2. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

        This critique covers a lot of the issues with Island of the Blue Dolphins – https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-critical-look-at-odells-island-of.html. The author of the critique is Native American (Nambé Pueblo) and includes an addendum by an Aleut woman who had bad experiences as a child because of the book (“I was taunted for it. I was asked by children and teachers to explain why Aleuts were “so mean.” And no matter what I said about my family, especially my grandmother, it wasn’t believed.”)

    3. Llellayena*

      And of course the encyclopedias are missing volumes D and Y, still list Pluto as a planet, are debating Russia vs USSR and only go up to the 39th president…

      1. Richard Hershberger*

        Back in the 1990s I taught at a Catholic school that did not replace books often. I found a dictionary that listed Adolf Hitler simply as “Chancellor of Germany.”

      2. SarahKay*

        A group of friends and I spend a week in a holiday cottage. It had both a scrabble set and a dictionary. The only problem was that the dictionary was 30 years old.
        A new rule was promptly agreed – if a word isn’t in the dictionary, but the majority agree that it is a word now, then the player was allowed it and the challenge over-ruled.

    4. Be Gneiss*

      I have a collection of some wildly outdated science books for my own amusement, but they probably aren’t best for the classroom!

      1. Chicago Anon*

        If you were writing a novel, or an academic paper, and needed to know “what did people know about X in 1913?” then the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica really would come in handy.

        I suppose it’s available on archive.org, though.

        1. Emily Byrd Starr*

          My mom still has her World Book Encyclopedia from 1953. She has it at the family lake cottage, and we often will pursue it just to see how much things have changed since then (i.e., a picture of Boston where the tallest building is the Custom House, a picture of the family sitting down to the evening meal and they are all dressed up like it’s a 5-star restaurant, etc.)

        2. Studious*

          My family owned a 1912 set! Got me a good grade on a paper about Peter the Great. Newer upgrades had to continually compress older information, so the older entries were more complete.

        3. RMNPgirl*

          I think it’s the 1911 Britannica that is actually considered one of the best and a collector’s item. My parents have it. It’s beautifully written and was published before WWI, when people thought we were reaching some pinnacle of human society.

    5. Roy G. Biv*

      Ah yes, the pack rat’s battle cry: “it might come in handy”

      Signed,
      Pack Rat in Recovery

    6. evens*

      In cleaning out a colleague’s classroom after he retired, I found thousands of dollars worth of laser discs. The district doesn’t even have a laser disc player anymore.

      I don’t have a problem with teachers still teaching Island of the Blue Dolphins (or Hamlet, or Pride and Prejudice).

      1. lyonite*

        I was embarrassingly far into high school history before it dawned on me that Ibid was not a very prolific Roman author.

    8. Jay (no, the other one)*

      A few years ago I tackled the Mountain of Things That Can Go In The Printer. This was at home several years after we ditched the inkjet printer for laser. We had several boxes of transparencies and a whole bunch of craft supplies for inkjet printers – iron-on printable patches, window clings, perforated cards. The pile of discards was at least two feet tall by the time I finished and I posted a photo to Facebook because I was amused. About five minutes later I had text from the office manager of our synagogue asking if she could have the stuff. She took all of it.

    9. KTinDC*

      I had the opposite of the first one! No filmstrips but I had the projector in my school library, and faced a riot from some teachers when I tried to get rid of it. This was in 2007. I did eventually manage to sneak it out, but I learned my lesson about asking people about stuff.

    10. Hagia*

      ‘ the misinformation “might come in handy” in the classroom ‘

      Okay, this has convinced me to finally get rid of my decade-old medical textbooks and test prep books. I hereby acknowledge that they will not come in handy.

    11. Glazed Donut*

      Inheriting a classroom from someone who retired is both its own circle of hell and highly entertaining for all these reasons!

      1. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

        I had to do this 8 times. These people had spent 35 years in the same classroom.

        Amazing how a clandestine case of beer will convince the school custodian to leave a “dumpster on wheels” outside of your classroom for as long as you needed it.

    12. Nea*

      Oh. Oh no. I remember The Cay from reading it as a kid and I liked it then, but now that I’m an adult I look at how Timothy was written and nooooooooo!

      1. JustaTech*

        I met the author when I was in 5th grade and he told us how he got his start in sports journalism – by blatantly plagiarizing a famous sports writer!

        We were all very into “island survival” stories at the time (Robinsons Caruso, the Voyage of the Mimi, etc) but none of us quite knew how to respond to this adult telling us that he did this “bad thing”.

    13. Wednesday*

      Not The Cay!! I had to read that in 6th and then somehow had to read it again in 7th. Couldn’t stand it either time.

    14. just a random teacher*

      I still use the overhead sheets and markers, but I’m probably an edge case. I teach math, and sometimes it is really useful to be able to do removable layers of things over other things, usually when graphing and comparing various things (rigid transformations of figures on the plane, mostly). At this point, the bottom layer is a piece of paper and the whole thing goes on my document camera rather than an overhead projector, but it was an annoying set of things to have to re-accumulate the last time I switched school districts because it went from “thing everyone has” to “oh, we threw those out” between jobs.

      I was also probably the last person to give up my actual overhead projector in my previous school, but that was at least partially because my data projector and several other things had been stolen one weekend but they left the overhead projector, so I knew it was the thing that was not a theft target and would thus reliably be where I left it. The document camera was better for most things, but the overhead was only slightly worse and much better than writing on the board, so it was a backup worth keeping since I had the storage space in case the data projector got stolen again.

      1. LikesToSwear*

        I had a math teacher in high school that couldn’t use the board, so she used an overhead projector and transparencies. I think she had enough for a couple of weeks.

        It was amazing how helpful that was for going back and forth, or providing notes/examples to a student who missed class for a couple of days.

    15. Seven If You Count Bad John*

      I admit to a habit of hanging on to old textbooks and stuff like that because they’re good raw materials for paper crafts.

    16. Ink*

      A much-beloved teacher at my high school was king of this. The school was old, and he somehow swung a remodel in his favor so he ended up with two classrooms connected by an interior door, with one’s old exterior door to the hall bricked over. No one else had an office, but if he didn’t the fire marshal would probably have some objections- the walls and his massive shelves were COVERED as it was.

      He had the only remaining blackboard. He had an overhead projector, dvd player, and vcr. He required all work to be written with a black pen, in cursive. He devoted a bit of class time to cursive when he started to get kids who hadn’t learned in elementary, but retired a couple years later.

      We used to joke about what he/his wife/the school were going to do with all the stuff CRAMMED into those rooms when he retired. Enough of it was mainly kept as part of lesson plans that we knew he would want to leave it for his successor. Well, COVID happened, and he finally had to retire. Health concerns meant he couldn’t even pack up the stuff he wanted to take home himself, and plenty was, indeed, left behind to be the new teacher’s problem.

      The school hired his son.

      1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

        the poor son to have to sort thru his dad’s work material, and anticipate having to do it again with his parents’ home when his dad passes.

    17. don'tbeadork*

      I left a bunch of that kind of stuff behind me when I retired. I suspect that someone had glommed onto them the day after I left the school. Quite likely the teacher across the hall.

      And binders. All the binders. Even though none of us have had the kids keep a physical notebook for at least 5 years.

    18. Gumby*

      But do you still have ditto machines?

      The outdated non-fiction books *could* be an interesting project in how knowledge has changed / been added to over the years. Or “what was thought about [topic] in [year].” The HPS student in me would find that type of thing fascinating.

    19. Ey-not-Cy*

      I inherited/moved into a school library 15 years ago, and feel like I am still throwing away stuff.
      I did get rid of the filmstrips and projectors.
      Gave away/sold record players (one to the drama department for a prop, lol.)
      Tossed VHS tapes and players.
      Our art department still uses the overhead projectors, so I still have a couple of those, plus so many random light bulbs.
      Bought a converter to convert all the slides to digital, so didn’t have to keep those; (they were also art related.)
      Discarded nonfiction books and encyclopedias. (They also make great paper project books.) We’ve done a lot of blackout poetry.
      6 Decades worth of several magazines–older than me, but none of the ones I could have sold to make money were there. Sigh.
      *I still “won” the hoarder award a couple of years ago. I told them if they wouldn’t ask me for such weird things I wouldn’t keep having to keep things. I take some comfort in knowing that at least I do/will throw things away.
      I’m nearing retirement myself. I’m sure my replacement will look around and wonder why I kept some of the things I have, too. :)

    20. Project maniac-ger*

      “If the history book doesn’t have Obama, we do not need to keep the whole set. Just one or two.”

    21. Jo*

      The overhead sheets have a fair number of uses as a sort of disposable using as an overlay, for tracing, with dry erase markers. Not sure if that warrants ordering MORE when current supply runs out. But definitely worth saving what you have – if they are actually being used.

  23. Strict Extension*

    At my last workplace, we eventually had to buy everyone a different colored stapler so they could be tracked when they went missing. We also hid decent scissors in our desks because of their habit of wandering. That’s something I’ve carried over to my new workplace. People are surprised I don’t have scissors because they don’t see them in my pen caddy and seem to think it’s weird that they’re tucked into the back of my drawer.

      1. Possum's Mom*

        Again, people! Use that empty tampon or pads box to keep your valuables safely tucked away in your desk. They seem to emit dangerous toxins to theiving hands

    2. Acadia Baker*

      I, too, keep the “good scissors” in my desk. A colleague once came by to use the decoy scissors in my pen caddy and remarked, “Whoa, you should get some better scissors.” To which I replied, “Eh, I hardly ever use them,” as I put my hand in the drawer and patted the Fiskars.

  24. Jester*

    I worked in an office with a high turnover and a single pair of scissors for the entire floor. When the keeper of the scissors inevitably moved one, they would bequeath them to someone else like they were an inheritance worth millions of dollars.

    1. US fed*

      This reminds me of the office knives. Our government offices didn’t used to have as much security, so folks brought in knives for things like slicing cake, etc. When the offices locked down post 9/11, knives became precious hoarded resources, since you couldn’t bring in a “weapon” anymore.

      1. Fed Anon*

        Same experience here. I’ve only been a Fed for a couple years, but I have been told that our knife collection is precious for exactly that reason. We’re big on snacks.

      2. Also Fed*

        Same lol, we also have a secret kitchen knife stash for potlucks lol

        My office also decided a few years ago that razor blades/box cutters were unsafe and tried to get rid of them. Everyone now has their secret box cutter/box of replacement blades because our job is just impossible to do with out them! They tried to replace them with essentially kiddie scissors… not the same lol

        1. JustaTech*

          Our old safety officer worked some place where they decided that box cutters were “too dangerous” and insisted that people use (dull, crappy) scissors.
          After several people ended up needing stitches from trying to open or break down boxes with bad scissors they bought everyone their own box cutter.

  25. Kabong*

    White out is still around even though it is never used anymore, but no one ever would dream of getting rid of it.

    The rest are things people still use a lot:

    Post-its with some preferring the standard size and others preferring the slightly larger and most liking the fun colors more than standard yellow.

    Graph paper notepads vs. standard lined notepads. We are engineers so need to draw things sometimes in the field or in meetings and graph paper is so much better.

    Specific pens – some pens just write so much better than others. The specific pens that are ordered only at the main office, not at the regional offices, my boss would always grab a couple boxes anytime he was in the main office for us as the pens we were able to order were basically crappy cheap bic pens.

    I WFH now so I just get whatever supplies I prefer and occasionally pick up a few notepads or post-its when I’m in the main office about twice a year. I do get reimbursed when I feel it is warranted, though for a pen here or there, I don’t worry about that myself.

    1. Former lab rat*

      LOL – we hoarded semi-log graph paper in spite of the fact all graphs are now done on the computer. This was a microbiology lab. HOWEVER when I was doing a growth curve I would plot it out, time point by time point, on the graph paper – that way I could see when I was approaching stationary phase. I could keep the graph right by the spec instead of walking back and forth to my desk and firing up the computer. After the experimebt was done I’d plot on the computer.

      Other commenter have said binder clips were saved. We had a drawer of large binder clips, glass plate,s and spacers for pouring protein gels. Hadn’t been used in decades since it is SO much easier to buy the gels these days.

      Pen and markers – every single person had a favorite kind and I had to order separately for each person.

    2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      I hate correction tape- I was using it yesterday, it unraveled, I popped the container open, spun it back, and now can’t get the container closed, so now the whole thing is useless.

      I really miss sponge White-Out.

    3. Charlotte Lucas*

      I will use white out on a manila envelope tab. (Yes, I still deal with some paper files.)

    4. Minimal Pear*

      I actually had to use a bunch of white-out last year for something in my personal life! Or, well, I used those things that dispense white strips, because that’s what the store had.

    5. Coffee Protein Drink*

      Oh wow, you just reminded me of something I haven’t thought of in years.

      I’m an old bat, and this was a temp job I had in the late 1980’s. I was working for an insurance company and there were some documents that we had to fill out (I don’t remember if we typed or hand-wrote) that had multiple NCR copies.

      We had Liquid Paper in white, pink, green, and yellow because the errors had to be corrected on each copy. I wonder what they’re doing now…

      1. Csethiro Ceredin*

        I was just thinking of those! My dad used to bring them home from work and little me always wanted to use them as paint.

        (And the liquid paper smell! It’s still so familiar in my mind)

    6. Your Mate in Oz*

      graph paper notebooks! We use engineering notebooks for a lot of stuff despite being 99% computer based.

      I bought my own to work once. One of the directors saw my notebook and went “where did you get that” in a very stern voice. I quailed a bit and he said “oh, no, I just really, really want one”. I sent him a link and within a week the supply cupboard had A4 and A5 graph paper notebooks as well as dot paper ones (just dots in a grid. For some things more useful than grid lines). Plus that director has the special luxury edition ones with thick card endplates instead of thin card.

    7. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      I fondly remember ordering post-its for User Experience designers. They went through a lot of them, and liked to have distinct colors to mark various purposes. That meant that I learned which sets in the supply catalog provided the best span of colors, and upon their joining the department I presented each new designer with something like a 10-pack of various colors to get them started.

      The stack of post-its on my own desk was composed of the thin remains of the discarded leftovers that the designers shed here and there.

  26. Not on fire today*

    I worked in a shared office with six other people, working with kids, and we only had two tape dispenser. Why?!?

    Also, office chairs. They felt like they were decades old. Some didn’t raise or lower. Some didn’t lean (others fell backwards). Arm rests would be stuck at wrong heights. If a staff person left, everyone tested that chair against their own to see which was better, and kept the better one. That meant the newest staff always had the worst chair.

  27. Hedgehug*

    “despite having no function in the 21st century.”

    Well according to that comment I wrote a few weeks ago complaining about my coworker constantly ruining my white out tape and everyone else deep diving into why we use white out tape in 2024, I’m going to say my white out correction tape lol.

    Don’t touch my white out tape!

    By the way, that coworker no longer touches it. He just asks me to do it for him lol.

    1. Kivrin*

      I love my correction tape. I use it in my bullet journal that I use for my weekly to-do lists even though I have all the digital calendars. I need the handwritten, colour-coded journal as a “touch grass” type of grounding point lol. And I use correction tape with some surprising frequency in it.

      1. Hedgehug*

        I hate digital calendars. My brain just cannot use them. It’s out of sight for me. I use a physical day planner at work, as does my boss. We are both pen and paper people and we regularly compare our day planners to make sure we have the same appointments…to make sure we are literally on the same page, ha! I’m a 35 year old millenial and day planners were drilled into us in school for such a long time.

        1. HBJ*

          Same, I cannot do a digital calendar. All hard copy for me. It’s also a lot harder to accidentally erase something out of a physical planner than a digital one!

    2. Aspiring Chicken Lady*

      You should have seen the adoration in the eyes of the Editorial team that my boss took on when we told them that they could order whiteout tape instead of the brush kind that was available in the supply room. And then we let on that they could have colored Post-Its and I think the room was filled with the golden light of miracles.

    3. Awesome Sauce*

      I have definitely used both white out correction tape and liquid paper within the past 12 months. I was marking up an engineering drawing by hand during a workshop and I made a mistake.

    4. Ama*

      During the MLB playoffs last year, there was a really complicated play on the field that then got overruled, and the color guy (a former player) was complaining that his scorecard was now all messed up (he scored in ink, apparently). The play by play guy offered him his white out tape and there was a hilarious pause before the color guy admitted he didn’t know how to use it.

      I don’t know, I thought it was funny.

    5. Usurper Cranberries*

      There’s a whole niche market among the paper planner folks for white out tape that’s off white to match off white notebooks, white out tape in different sizes (I have 3mm wide and 5mm wide in tiny travel-friendly dispensers), old-school liquid white out in precision dispensers, etc.

  28. Warrant Officer Georgiana Breakspear-Goldfinch*

    For some reason that literally no one understands, my office does not have an “office supplies” cabinet/cupboard/what-have-you for even the basics like pens, file folders, tissues, etc. We have to look at the approved vendor’s catalog (which at least is online now), fill out a request in a spreadsheet (one row per thing), and the office admin will order it. For example, I cannot grab one (1) highlighter when I need one; I have to request it specifically, and they only come in a box of 6 or 12 or whatever, and will arrive between 5-10 business days later. Do I have a pen cup full of my exact preferred pens? Yes. Do I think this system is sane? Absolutely not.

    1. The Analyst*

      What happens when someone leaves a role for another company? Are their ordered supplies bequeathed to others in a weird ceremony? Dumped in the trash? Hoarded by an admin somewhere in a closet that could be deemed a “supply closet” but is privately guarded? This is so impractical, I love it.

    2. MissouriGirl in LA*

      Oh….are you working in my agency? Open the so-called supply cabinet and I have no clue what’s in there except nothing that I would need. LOL And when I did ask for something, like a couple of notepads, I got the entire pack.

  29. FricketyFrack*

    I have a stapler meant for people with weak hands or carpal tunnel or whatever, because my old job involved an extreme amount of stapling, and it’s my baby and I would shank anyone who tried to take it. I barely use it anymore, but I don’t care. It’s the best.

    We also all really like a particular pen but we have about 2439278934 other pens that have been bought over the years, so we finally decided to quit buying the ones we really like until we’ve used the others, so the favorite pens got hoarded a bit, too. Sadly, I used up my last one, so now I’m stuck with inferior pens. I’m working my way through the Signos and the it’ll be the G2s and then maybe the crappy off-brand ones will have dried out and we can get the good ones ago.

      1. FricketyFrack*

        I *have* been making extra effort to write, in an attempt to use up some of them. Plus, my coworker accepts passport applications, which requires a TON of writing, so she can go through a pen every couple of weeks. At this rate, we’ll be through the backlog in oh, 3 years?

  30. The Prettiest Curse*

    My previous job was with early childhood educators, who laminate just about everything. At some point prior to my arrival in that job, they purchased 2 manual (hand-crank) laminators that were never used because they didn’t work. Apparently they felt bad about their failed attempt at eco-friendliness, because those things sat there gathering dust for years till we were forced to get rid of them due to our storage space being relocated.

    1. ST*

      The principal of the school where I work decided that laminating was killing the environment and got rid of the laminators. So now one of the early childhood teachers has a contraband laminator that you *might* get to use if you’re in the know.

  31. Cat Rolls*

    I’m a vet tech. One of the doctors at my place washes and hoards her gloves in a drawer after every surgical procedure. She never re-uses them; she just…hoards them. In a drawer. When she gets up to about 30 pairs I prune the colony down to 10 because if she fills up that drawer, she just moves to another one.

    1. Siege*

      I have to say, I’ve become the vehicle between hoarders and the trash (give me your hoarded fabric, I’ll make sure it goes to a nice farm upstate and frolics with the lambs and bunnies (goes to the thrift store)) and it’s a way to make a real difference for people. If it just goes away, that’s okay, but if they have to be the agent of its going-away, that’s impossible. So kudos to you for pruning the colony!

      1. Numbat*

        isn’t it so weird how people will refuse to take something to the bin and “waste it” but will happily give it to you to… take care of it.

    2. JustaTech*

      Oh man, my old lab manager would have had some words with your vet!

      I worked in an academic lab but our grant actually had money *specifically* for consumables, so we didn’t have to be nearly as thrifty as some other labs. If our lab manager caught you re-wearing gloves she would read you the riot act about how unsafe it was, and how it could ruin your experiment.
      I was kind of confused by this (it was my first lab) until I had to borrow another lab’s instrument and I was told to take a box of gloves as an offering.

  32. Be Gneiss*

    At OldJob, we made a product that was packed and sold by weight, and which had a 2-stage filling process. The weight of the containers had to be verified at each stage. When I started in 2015, they were still using old-school balances from the 1940s – 50s. It took a 2 year campaign to switch to digital scales…and I was not allowed to get rid of the old scales. DOZENS of them were thrown in a heap on a pallet, wrapped in plastic, and put in a rack for storage. I was told we had to keep them, just in case we had a power outage.
    Reader…*none* of our processing equipment could run during a power outage. If the power went out, we’d have nothing to weigh.

  33. IT hoarding*

    One company had a box of PC components. Not a new stash of repair parts in packaging. But ancient scavenged parts tossed in a box. I found RAM sticks with megabytes of memory in an age were 4 gigs were standard. There were PCI cards that had no identifiable purpose. We were told it was a just in case box but because everything was tossed into a box the likelihood of anything working was slim.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      Just in case there’s an alien invasion after an apocalypse and you need to reinforce your vehicle Mad Max style, you can use those pieces as armor or projectiles.
      Duh.

    2. Cyborg Llama Horde*

      Oooh, IT hoarding is BAD. 15 boxes of cables, sorted by kind if you’re lucky. You only need one about twice a year, but you never know WHICH one.

      I had a job where we always replaced the heat sinks in servers we bought with a better one, and we had an entire shelf worth of the old heat sinks, because they were perfectly good… the third time I organized that space, I sent them all to tech recycling, and no one noticed.

      We also accumulated a LOT of thermal paste, because it comes in itty bitty tubes and you can never find it when you need it.

      1. Be Gneiss*

        “It’s still perfectly good” is going on my mother-in-law’s headstone. Every visit, she brings us a box of “perfectly good” trash.

      2. Sharpie*

        IT hoarding is legendary. During my military days, we had big olive drab crates assigned to, and full of:
        1. Mice
        2. Keyboards
        3. ‘Kettle’ (power) leads
        4. Removable hard drive cases (as in, both the cases we’d put the drives into and the case that we’d put into the computer – basically rendering the hard drive as removable as a floppy disc so it could be locked away if had classified material on it. Why yes, this was back in the noughts!)

        And probably stuff I’ve forgotten. I built my very first computer, and monitor, base unit, keyboard and mouse all came from different manufacturers, the last two and the power leads dug out from our stores.

        1. mischief*

          I really hope people start calling that decade the naughties (or, I suppose, noughties).

    3. periwinkle*

      You’ve just described my husband’s home office. So many cables that only work with peripherals that haven’t been sold since the 1990s, but “you never know, I might need it.”

      1. Oh yeah, Me again*

        We had a projector crisis at the clubhouse recently: no ca le yo connect the laptop to projector for a program. I rummaged thro that box of old cords and found one either the right connectors for both devices. sometimes. . .”you never know”. . . it really does come in handy.

        1. AcademiaNut*

          I do have a box with one of each cable type and adaptor – you rarely need them, but when you do it’s incredibly useful. I also spent a very productive hour a couple of years ago using coloured electrical tape to colour code all the cables, with matching tags on the various devices. That way, I can quickly grab the exact cable I need.

    4. Ashley*

      I had a place that had an IT closet full of old computers. No one was sure what to do with them. I talked to the in house person who dealt with IT before you called in the big guns to ask them why the room was covered in old computers. They didn’t know how to dispose of them. I got so much money in Staples rewards and was a hero to a few people for taking on the task of disposing of all the old computers and cables.
      We ended up finding a slew of typewriters, but that required an office email to see if anyone wanted to claim them. The office hoarder had all three of them in their office for over a year until the company president forced them to clean for safety.

    5. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      When I started this job in 2021, there was a drawer of 3 inch floppies.

      The computer they gave me was from 2011 and I was advised not to turn it off because they weren’t sure it would ever turn back on.

      I had a SQUARE LED monitor, a concept I didn’t know existed and can’t wrap my head around, despite the fact that I used it for about 8 months.

      1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

        I inherited a very small square monitor when a colleague who had been at the company forever left, and the monitor was deemed old and useless. I thought otherwise, and had enough monitor ports on the reception desk computer to plug it in. That was the monitor I used to keep the team chat and other things I needed to keep up with visible at all times. (And my phone, since holding my phone and using it during downtime had the appearance of slacking even though I was caught up on all my work, but having my phone plugged in discreetly and occasionally checking my messages on the computer was unexceptionable.)

    6. zuzu*

      At one job I had, the AV guy had a hoard of old AV equipment. Some of it was legit, like we did need a VCR because we had VHS tapes in our collection and we needed a way to access them, at least until he was able to digitize them.

      But a lot of what was in there was crap he kept because he didn’t want to part with it because it was cool or interesting to him, or he “might find a use for it.”

      And then one day, I came out of my office, which was across from the AV hoard room, and noticed there was water coming out from under the door of the AV hoard. It was raining in there. The ancient air handler that was above the hoard had leaked into the hoard. The AV guy sprang into action and pulled out his babies, but a lot of his junk was beyond saving. Fortunately, the actual good stuff was out of the reach of the water because it was either in his office or in a staging area near his office because it got a lot of use. But his hoard was largely destroyed, and frankly it made not a bit of difference to his ability to do his actual job or anyone’s ability to access even the more obscure items in the collection.

      1. zuzu*

        However, one good thing that came of it — the loss of so much AV equipment was the kick in the pants that was required to get the air handler finally replaced. We just didn’t mention how useless what was lost actually was.

    7. Pita Chips*

      That sounds like the Box of Random Hardware ™ that I have in my closet. Even though I prune it every time I move, it fills up again.

      I could probably ditch the charging cables from my iPhone 3….

  34. Ssssssss*

    The weird relic that we eventually got rid of (but still probably went through at least 2 office moves): an electric typewriter. I think the tipping point was when someone tried to get me to actually use it for something and I had to tell them that I didn’t actually have a clue how to use it.
    Supplies that I swear replicate like tribbles: binders and binder clips. And yet, when someone is looking for a bunch, we don’t have any/enough that are quiiiiite what the person is looking for.
    Item that someone HAD TO HAVE: thermal binding machine. Used once and never again.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      We had one until a couple years ago. An email went out informing people that the two typewriters will no longer be available.
      I thought that was fitting.

      1. MKR*

        At my first adult job, c2002, we had a non-electric typewriter. But it wasn’t a relic! We had to submit things to the Federal government sometimes, and this particular program had some forms that had not been digitized in a fillable way. And you had to use That Form, or your submission would be rejected. We also had to submit printed photos from 35 mm film, by actual physical mail, with typed labels. The labels could be done by a computer, though it was often easier to put them through the typewriter than our finicky printer.

    2. CL*

      I worked somewhere with an electric typewriter at least until 2007. None of the new hires had ever used one and we could barely find replacement ribbons. Unfortunately, there was a business reason we still had to keep it around and functioning.

      1. Caro488*

        Our library had one until 2 years ago. Needed it to type labels for books. Except the books came to us processed with labels. So we used it to repair labels maybe twice a year. The only ribbon was so used that we had to type letters over 3-4times to get a complete dark impression. We finally refused to use it.

      2. Ashley*

        We used to have a typewriter where I work. They finally got rid of them. We still have the ribbons and correction tape in the supply closet.

    3. Richard Hershberger*

      Typewriters were legitimately, if niche, useful up to, oh, let’s say ten years ago. There were standard forms (court forms, in my personal experience) that even if available in pdf, still had to be physically filled out. The ubiquity of fillable pdfs is what finally killed this off. At this point, if I encountered a form that had to be physically filled out, I would use a pen and my neatest writing (which actually is pretty legible, if I am motivated).

      1. Jay (no, the other one)*

        I still sometimes get forms on paper that have to filled out by hand. In fact when I was credentialed for a hospital staff a few months ago, several of the forms had to be printed out, filled out by hand, and then scanned and Emailed back. It was nuts. And I’m a doctor. Why oh why do you want me to fill something out by hand? We no longer have a typewriter or I would definitely have hauled it out.

        1. Nightengale*

          I’m a doctor with a handwriting disability. (not the joke about illegible doctor handwriting. an actual neurological condition affecting handwriting.)

          I now have all but the most rudimentary of forms scanned in so I can convert to PDF and fill them out that way. Or I write a letter through the EHR providing the same information. So the school/disability determination agency/insurance etc can actually read what I wrote.

          My favorite is the school who insisted my documentation for disability accommodations for my patient be on their form (which also used all sorts of outdated language.) I had to talk the school into giving me a 504 accommodation of signing by hand and attaching all the rest of the info typed so I could complete the form for my patient 504 accommodation.

          Also half my life is still in fax. And my “paperless” practice has papers piled up all over my desk. . .

        2. Seven If You Count Bad John*

          Then, the person at the other end, has to manually enter all the info from your scanned document into Salesforce or Epic or whatever. (This was my job for half a decade until just last year.)

        3. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

          At a college I attended, one the offices would not accept any form filled out on a computer because they could only accept “originals.” The form itself was a fillable PDF, so I had to print the form and fill it out by hand. Which would make sense if the next step was to mail or physically bring it to the office. Nope. The next step was to scan the document to a PDF and upload it on the office’s document repository website.

      2. Not on board*

        I used to use a typewriter to fill things out all the time. But if you have the full version of Adobe or comparable program, you can scan the document and then turn it into a fillable form. I’ve done this with everything because I hate nothing more than having to write in a form. We have customers who use typewriters for things like cheques and multipart forms which require pressure for the print to go through to the 2nd or 3rd page.

    4. Beancounter Eric*

      We still have an IBM electric at my current office. It gets used every month or two.

      Too many non-fillable PDF’s.

      2. Industry Behemoth*

        Or the fillable field isn’t big enough, and the font size isn’t adjustable.

        Or the fillable field just weirds out.

      3. CR*

        In that case, I would print it out and fill it in by hand! I would never think of using a typewriter.

        1. Oh yeah, Me again*

          I have to hand address envelopes – because our printers won’t handle them – I think that looks unprofessional. I’d love to have one typewriter around the place for that. (and single lables)

    5. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

      I used a typewriter YESTERDAY!

      We still make our own labels for our books at my library, and the label printer refuses to use the entire label, so for longer call numbers, they need to be typed. Also, for faded labels, after we changed cataloging systems five years ago, it’s actually now faster to just type them in the typewriter than scan the barcodes and pull them from our system and plug that into the label printer program to be printed out, because there’s no good way to do them that doesn’t end up being a lot more individual typing plus pointing/clicking (I’m hoping when we change cataloging systems again next year that I can go back to just needing to scan the books to build the file for the label program).

      Also, we use the typewriter to fill out the donor info note on our book plates that go inside donated books. If we were allowed to have individual printers instead of just the label printer and the giant, finicky shared copier/scanner/printer that won’t take sticker paper, I could create them on the computer and just print them out as needed onto sticker paper–but because our institution got rid of everyone’s individual printers a few years ago, I have no choice but to use the typewriter on the special-ordered crack&peel paper that has our institutional seal on it.

      Back when I had student employees, it was always fun to get to teach them how to use the typewriter. I don’t mind using it. I just worry about the day it becomes impossible to get typewriter tape for it. But that’s Future Jaunty Banana Hat I’s problem.

    6. Oh yeah, Me again*

      We had a projector crisis at the clubhouse recently: no ca le yo connect the laptop to projector for a program. I rummaged thro that box of old cords and found one either the right connectors for both devices. sometimes. . .”you never know”. . . it really does come in handy.

    7. Anon for This*

      Ditto on the typewriter. We had an IBM Selectric, jealously guarded by the person who was sure we would all need it one day, and who kept the typeballs hidden, so one had to ask her permission to use it. (She was right – I was going on international travel and the foreign country required a visa application, typed on their hard copy form.) The typewriter was finally disposed of when she retired, largely because no one ever found the typeballs!

    8. TX_TRUCKER*

      We got rid of our electric typewriter about 3 years ago, when the Feds finally digitized the last annual report form we needed to submit. We used to have a big party on report day, when the typewriter came out of the closet. It was a surprising amount of fun to show it to the younger staff and then hide it away like a priceless relic.

    9. Here's a name*

      We got rid of the IBM Selectric a couple years ago over my objections. I had to refurb the manual Royal from the 1920s that I have as decor at home in order to complete the one annual grant application from the old school community foundation that only accepts typewritten on their custom hardcopy form, which I swear is xeroxed from a memeograph.

  35. The Curse of the Zoom Meetings*

    All my office supplies are bright purple — stapler, scissors, pens, you name it. I’ve never had a problem with anything going missing.

    1. lilsheba*

      you would with me I love purple (evil laugh) Lucky for you I work from home and can get all the purple stuff I want lol.

    2. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

      They’re not office supplies, but for my mom’s work (she’s a general contractor, which is obviously a very male-dominated industry), she spray paints the handles on all of her tools bright pink or purple, because guys never want to steal pink/purple tools. She has never had any of her pink/purple tools walk off of any job sites.

      1. HigherEdExpat*

        My dad who at the end of his career was a maintenance man on a plant floor was tired of his (labelled) thermos going missing. He (secure in his masculinity, former registered Girl Scout, and father of two daughters) bought a bright purple thermos. 7 years post retirement he still has it.

  36. Sarge*

    File folders. Regular, 1/5 cut file folders. Boxes go missing at a time. The office manager, who I haven’t seen in months (does she still work here???), purchases nice colorful ones for herself and locks them up. The rest of us are scrounging for folders.

    1. Minimal Pear*

      Oh my god yeah I swear some sort of creature must be EATING our plain manila folders, because boxes of them go missing as well!

  37. Masha*

    Do you ever find a little bag of those plastic tabs for labeling hanging folders, and just pocket it immediately because you know you’ve hit the jackpot?

    1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      Oh my yes. Every once in a while I have to buy more for home, because the ones I inherited from my dad 35 years ago are disintegrating. As soon as I buy new ones, I find a stash I made from previously.

    2. Where paper clips retire to*

      We have boxes of these laying in our cabinet, never to be used again since we’ve moved on to digital.

    3. SpecialSpecialist*

      YES! Especially if they still have the paper tab that actually fits in them and you don’t have to make your own. :D

  38. Amber T*

    Pre-covid, I kept track of everything on post its – my to do list, outstanding items owed to me by someone else, reminders on my monitor. Looking back it makes me anxious just thinking about it. I used to have this massive old desk – it must have been a really nice one in its prime but it was decades old, super scuffed up. My old office was the old (admittedly large) closet that they stuck this massive old desk in – I asked if I could move from an open cubicle to this windowless room and they agreed.

    Anyway, covid happened and all of a sudden I went from a too-big desk to sharing a relatively small desk with my now husband. I also didn’t take any post its with me (I remember thinking this whole WFH thing would only be a “few” weeks…). So no room or ability to use post its. I ended up transferring everything – to do list, tracker, notes, reminders – to an online platform which makes my life way easier and more organized.

    I still have a drawer full of every color and size post it note my office buys. I use maybe 2 a month.

    1. Data Nerd*

      What platform do you use? I too use post-its and have problems with them going missing.
      Also, to stay on topic, the pens (and only the pens) have been moved from the supply closet to the office manager’s space, along with the time-off forms. No reason why.

        1. Emotional Support Baby Groot*

          cosign Todoist! It has made my life so much easier and more organized. I put everything on it – work tasks and appointments, medical appointments, exercise, social stuff, reminders, etc. I created templates for multi-step tasks at work so I can check everything off and make sure nothing gets forgotten.

        1. Cat*

          Does anyone use a platform like this for things to do at home? Basically just yourself? Or is it really just for teams?

          1. Shellfish Constable*

            My husband and I use Trello. We share a “home board” and can see when the other person has checked items off a to do list or can swipe away a big task once it’s complete.

          2. Admin of Sys*

            I use it for myself, or at least I used to. I’m currently back to just writing everything down stream of consciousness, but I really liked Trello when I was using it. I had a board per room.

          3. Tinkerbell*

            I use Todoist at home. One thing I particularly like (not sure if this is on other platforms as well) is being able to schedule things based on when you last remembered to do them. If I say to remind me to change the A/C filter every month, it will remind me on the same day each month. If I say every! month, it will remind me a month *from when I actually did it,* which is a lot more helpful for things I don’t necessarily remember to do the moment they’re due :-P

          5. Betty*

            I used Trello for wedding planning. My coordinator was so impressed she actually gave a presentation about it at a professional conference (and offered me a job if I ever wanted it!)

          7. TechWorker*

            Trello both for my work todo list (just mine, no team involved) & for a house jobs todo list with my partner.

          8. rudebeckia*

            I use Asana at work and TickTick at home – I really like that TickTick shows your calendar, habits, and to-do list all in one place.

          9. Allison K*

            Big fan of Things 3 by Cultured Code – it’s not free, but it’s one payment instead of a subscription and syncs beautifully between phone and laptop.

      3. Amber T*

        I use Notion! I have a job where I am just supposed to know a bunch of history and reasons why we did something 5 years ago – I’ve found it invaluable when it comes to keeping track of things now. I use it heavily at work (with a specific business teamspace with my coworkers) and on and off for personal/home stuff (with a personal account).

      4. Ace in the Hole*

        I really like todoist – the free version has almost all the features, I’ve never felt a need to move to the paid version.

    2. RedinSC*

      Ha, I’m looking at one of my monitors right now and there’s 7 post its along the bottom with information that I need occasionally, but when I need it, I “NEED” it.

      I should switch to an online tracker like that, but haven’t made that switch yet. I have blue, orange and yellow post its at the moment.

      1. Kelly White*

        My monitor is like that at work, and I can remote in and work from home, so I took a picture of the post-it notes, and made a “work” photo album in my phone.

        1. StarTrek Nutcase*

          I had a supervisor who had a “graveyard” of about 25 small post-it notes – all lined up in 4 rows in front of her keyboard & under her monitor. Several times a year when I was “in” a mood, I’d sneak in and swap some around. She’d rant but surprisingly never suspected me.

      2. Throwaway Account*

        Ha, I literally have 7 post it notes on one monitor rn! One on the other monitor.

        I recently started using Loop with a colleague for a shared space – mostly because it is free for us at work.

      3. Seamyst*

        I use OneNote and have a page for quick-reference things like our EIN, who to reach out to for XYZ, and so on. So much nicer-looking than a bunch of post-its along the bottom of my monitor!

        1. RedinSC*

          You fancy!

          But seriously, I’ve been thinking about doing that, just haven’t made that transition yet. AND our EIN is one of those number I need to remember, it takes me forever to dig it up EVERY TIME I need it.

          Perhaps I’ll make an 8th post it!

          1. Ainsley Hayes*

            You can also enter the EIN as an alternate phone number for your company in your contacts – just add a zero at the end. You will always have it with you.

    3. Artemesia*

      large post its are great for grocery lists and for organizing to do lists like for a party. I slap them on the side of the refrigerator when organizing a dinner party so I don’t forget any courses, or to obtain missing items, or to make sure I have all the dishes I need. (I’m old, I forget the fancy cheese in the refrigerator or to make sure I have enough serving dishes read to go)

  39. Lily*

    My last office it was tiny cassette tapes. The older generation of lawyers still liked to give dictation and refused to go digital. They are near impossible to buy new anymore so they would hoard them and record over their old work over and over and over until they busted.

    1. Lily C*

      One upside to the forced change to working remotely in 2020 was that our senior attorneys were finally broken of their Dictaphone addictions. I still get the occasional voice memo to transcribe, but the days of kicking that dang foot pedal out of the way when I’m in the office are long gone.

  40. HelpMeRonda*

    My dad closed his business in 2016, but he had a vintage paycheck writing machine. If you’ve never seen one, it’s like a cross between an old-timey cash register and a giant rubber stamp with a hand crank. In the last 4 years of his business, I managed his payroll and had to use this contraption to write employee and vendor checks. I made him keep it after the business closed b/c someday it’s going to sit in my house. I loved that thing and how absurd it was to still be using it in the 21st century.

    1. Richard Hershberger*

      I used to have a farmers market near me that included Amish vendors. I was enchanted the first time one of them took the pencil from behind his ear, wrote the price of each item I was purchasing on a brown paper back, added it up, and put the items in the bag.

      1. Funbud*

        When I was a kid In Connecticut, one of the local butchers rented space to a produce seller. The sellers were two elderly brothers who wore long white aprons and, in summer, straw boater hats! They added everything up on brown paper bags using thick black wax pencils (which used to be called “china markers”). They were a real touch of Olde New England!

    2. Elle Woods*

      I love those vintage machines. I inherited a mechanical adding machine from my grandfather. He used it when he managed a bank.

      1. Seven If You Count Bad John*

        Somewhere I have my grandfather’s slide rule. (He was an engineer.) alas, I no longer remember how to use it. (There’s probably a YouTube video for it)

    3. lilsheba*

      You would be amazed at how easily you could sell something like that. There are tons of old machines and tools of all sorts that get sold on instagram lives every day. Someone would want it.

    4. zuzu*

      When the big blackout happened in 2003, I was able to get dinner after walking home to Brooklyn because the restaurant I stopped at had gas stoves and one of those old credit-card machines with the carbons. I didn’t have any cash on me and of course all the ATMs were down. There were a lot of places open and selling food cheap, but cash only.

  41. Jane Bingley*

    Oh, this is my favourite story.

    When cleaning out a printing room in 2017, I discovered a printer cartridge that expired in 1994. It had been moved in three different office moves. It was only compatible with a type of printer that had not been made in nearly thirty years and was not owned by anyone at our office. I laughed, took a photo of the expiry date, and threw it out.

    Another employee fished it out of the garbage, scolded me for being wasteful, and put it back on the shelf of printer supplies.

    1. MelMc*

      At least when I found the mimeograph machine spare parts I was allowed to throw them out. This was 25 years ago now but the building was 20 years old at the time and had never had a mimeograph machine. We suspected a certain faculty member had moved the spare parts at least twice for them to arrive in that cabinet. Luckily the faculty member had forgotten them when she moved buildings again six months earlier so they were disposed of along with an equal number of parts for old copiers and faxes.

      1. Mim*

        I graduated from college around 25 years ago, and had a music professor who would usually have handouts (sitting on a music stand, of course) for students to pick up as they walked into class. At the time I was a student, the pile of handouts was about 1/3 to 1/2 blue mimeographs, and you can bet that I would always find one of the mimeographed sheets to take. For old times’ sake.

        He must have made zillions of copies of those handouts at some point, and just had them on file somewhere to grab for his classes. Because of the subject matter, it was the kind of stuff that was never going to become outdated. Basic music theory breakdowns of a section of a Beethoven symphony, and stuff like that. And I know this makes him seem like a mothridden old fart who had tenure and was phoning it in for decades, but he wasn’t! I wasn’t a music major, and took his classes because I wanted to, and he was freaking awesome. He just loved the subject matter so much that he could stay as excited about the content of his mimeographed handouts for decades beyond when they were created.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          I also graduated from college about 25 years ago and *was* a music major and wish I could remember if the wonderful professor your description brings up had had mimeographed handouts for his classes. He was amazing, thank you for bringing my memories of him flooding back. That said, it sure would be nice to know that there are two of those professors out there (or were, anyway; I believe the one I had is since retired but likely still an amazing person).

  42. The Leanansidhe*

    I’m a pen snob. I buy this particular brand every time, hoard it in my desk, and use it religiously. It’s because these pens are very thin and I like to write very small. Now it’s a running joke that people buy me pens in the office for my birthday and my anniversary at the company; my favorite so far are some my boss bought for me in Japan. So thankful to my coworkers for playing along with my pen obsession rather than just thinking I’m incredibly strange.

    1. Unobtainium Miner*

      Massive pen snob here! When I was a bank teller, any decent pens would get swiped by other tellers. I ended up switching to a fountain pen. Then when I got back into my chosen field of automotive, I switched to a purple gel pen (I worked with older men that weren’t afraid of a fountain pen, but writing in PURPLE INK?!? The horror!!!) On the plus side, it made my instructions stand out.

    2. Beancounter Eric*

      Oh, yeah…..Looking at my desk right now (I ought to be working on Property Tax Renditions, but they’ll wait until after lunch), I have the following from my personal stock:

      BiC four-color pen, orange barrel (fine point)
      Cross Multipen
      Pentel Multipen
      Skilcraft Aviator Multipen
      Rotring 600 Pen, Pencil, Multipen
      Pilot EasyTouch retractable, black ink, fine point. x2
      Uni 0.38 pens, black ink x2
      Uniball One 0.38, black ink
      Uni Jetstream, black ink, .28
      Fisher AG-7 Spacepen

      And the sad fact is I write no better with them than I do with a basic BiC Cristal. :-(

      1. The Meat Embezzler*

        A few OldJobs ago the office manager was sick of the crappy pens the company used to order and decided to upgrade to Pilot G2s. When those things arrived it was a stampede as people started hoarding them. I didn’t blame anyone, I love G2s haha.

        1. Anonopotamus*

          At a previous job, I was in charge of ordering supplies for my small department (me, three peers, and our manager). All orders placed on our supplier’s website then had to be approved by our office manager/facilities guy. We were only supposed to order plain boring shitty Bic-equivalent supplier-brand ballpoints. Whenever I needed to order a few boxes of those, I’d also add some G2s.

          I don’t know whether Facilities Guy never noticed those on the orders, or just didn’t care…he always approved my orders without question.

          My teammates (and a friend on another team) LOVED me for this. Everyone got very excited when I’d come around handing out G2s on New Pen Day. I even took special orders so everyone could have the thickness and ink color they preferred.

        2. Someguy*

          I like G2s (and positively loathe the supercheap standard pens we order) – so I would buy them myself (not worth fighting about).

          One day as I was walking around with some G2s hanging from my lanyard, one of our touch labor said half-mockingly about how nice it was that I got the good pens, and then half-wistfully that the gels were better at [legitimate business purpose] for [actual reasons].

          So I sent an email to our admin, who is both delightful and a valiant warrior in defense of corporate funds, that: because they were better at [legitimate business purpose] for [actual reasons], people in departments X, Y, and Z need these pens. Please order so many blue, black, red, and green. And so it came to pass.

          Of course such treasures cannot be left in the main supply cabinet for just anyone, they were entrusted to a junior employee in department Y, who will only give you a pen if you: are in departments X, Y, or Z; ask him; or take it when he is out of office (though please do leave a note if we are running low.)

          (Well, originally entrusted to a manager of department Z, but he quickly decided that it was too much trouble. So the torch was passed.)

    3. Panicked*

      RSVP fine point or Zebra F-301 are the only pens I will use because of the very fine point on them. Pens are SERIOUS business.

    4. Not on board*

      If you write all the time, you need to be a pen snob. My thing is how pens glide over the paper – if it’s not smooth enough I toss the pen. When you’re writing all day long, your hand gets tired if the pen isn’t smooth enough.

    5. PricklyPearOverThere*

      Huge pen snob here! I carry a pencil case full of my favorite writing implements with me in my work bag so I can use the pens and pencils I prefer during the day. The cup of writing implements on my desk is purely sacrificial. Anyone can grab from it because I don’t really care about those pens. Works like a charm!

    6. Sharpie*

      Im left-handed and have very small writing. The only pens I’ve found that work for me are Pentel BK-77 Superb. Love those things!

    8. Mack*

      If you’re ever in Brooklyn I’d recommend visiting Yoseka Stationery – they have a hundred or so pens on a long table so you can try before you buy.

  43. I believe you have my...*

    I work at a large tech company that has recently swung from decades of notoriously spoiling its employees to an Age of Austerity. It has been unpleasant overall, but the highlight was definitely when someone filed a facilities ticket to get a missing stapler replaced at the printer near their desk. They were told that staplers were being removed from printers company-wide.

    Meltdown ensued. Our company was in an absolute uproar over this for days. We build things for the internet so there was not a huge amount of use for the staplers — but when you need one you need one, and a lot of people were just pissed off on principle. A few staplers for each floor of 100s of employees seemed such an insanely petty thing to take away.

    After days of uproar, we were told that the original response was incorrect, that there was no such initiative and we would definitely have staplers at printers. (Which, a year later, has proven true… so far.) But no one knows if the response was actually incorrect or if they backed off because they didn’t want to deal with years of Milton Waddams references from their embittered employees. I assume we’ll find out when the lowly facilities person who originally responded to the ticket writes their tellall.

  44. periwinkle*

    My current team is level-headed about office supplies so I have nothing to contribute here, but…

    WE STILL NEED AN UPDATE ABOUT THE $48 OF OFFICE SUPPLIES!

    OMG, I’d forgotten how banana pants that ex-boss was.

      1. PropJoe*

        If it had been me in that scenario…

        Them: “Give us back the $48 in office supplies or we’ll call your dad and tell on you!”

        Me: “Lol good luck with that, Dad has been dead for nearly a decade.”

        If something like that had happened while he was still alive, he would’ve laughed and told them to go eff themselves. He had his flaws, no doubt, but he wasn’t afraid to tell people to eff off when it was warranted.

  45. CL*

    Intraoffice mail envelopes. There is actually a department at my employer that I think still uses them. Not sure what they did while the office was closed during the pandemic.

    2. periwinkle*

      We still use them! It’s the official way to send physical documents between offices, which we have scattered across the country.

      I recently deactivated a company-issued cell phone. The return instructions were to disconnect all accounts, do a factory reset, and then return the phone by sticking it into an intraoffice mail envelope and sending it to a designated mail code.

    3. Beancounter Eric*

      Current company uses them. We have two facilities about 10 miles apart, and there’s always some form, mail delivered at Address A which should have gone to Address B…..they get used a good bit.

    5. Charlotte Lucas*

      Years ago, someone in another office found an insect they couldn’t identify, so they put it in one of those containers for mechanical pencil leads, added a sticky note, put everything in an interoffice envelope, and sent it to our location, where we had a colleague with a degree in entomology. He identified the insect and reported back. (This was before camera phones were common.)

      Very creative use of office supplies.

  46. MI Dawn*

    Not in that office any more, but pens. You basically had to offer your right arm to get replacement pens – the very lousy, sold-by-the-thousands-for-$1.00 – pens. I started buying my own, because I wanted something that wrote reliably. My (relatively more)expensive gel pens would vanish off my desk so I started to lock them up. People stated coming to me and complaining they didn’t have a pen and would refuse to get one of the cheap pens. I started engraving my name on the pens to keep them.

    Some of the worst offenders? The doctors in the office. They’d wander off with them and I’d never see the pen again. And they made probably 2+ what I did in salary, and were SO OFFENDED when I suggested their secretary purchase these pens for them when “there were boxes of pens in the cabinet”!

    Yeah…boxes of pens that NO ONE wanted to use…

    I was so happy to leave there with about 65% of the pens I had purchased going with me.

    1. Jay (no, the other one)*

      I’m a doctor. Years ago I borrowed a pen from the unit clerk (so long ago that it was to write a note in a paper chart). When I returned it she looked at me in astonishment. She’d been working there for 15 years. I was the first doc to ever return a pen.

      1. SheLooksFamiliar*

        I’m ridiculously attached to my Pilot G-2 pens. I mean, I have refills and spare pens in every handbag, briefcase, backpack, and room in the house. But I also have a stash of cheap pens, and that’s what someone gets if they need one. I’ve lost too many G-2s to be generous anymore.

        The sole exception was a guy who poked his head out of a conference room, and I happened to be hot-desking nearby. He was in an all-day meeting with the C-suite and his pen ran out of ink. Did I have a cheap pen that I would be okay never seeing again? I gave him a G-2, saying a day-long meeting sounded challenging enough. He might as well have a good pen.

  47. Hybrid Employee (Part Human, Part Wolf)*

    Enamel pins and/or stickers of our discontinued company mascot. When we rebranded he was retired, and if you find merch that still has him you’d better hoard it.

    Similarly, one specific run of branded pens from 2021 — when we rebranded, that vendor didn’t have the same model in our new color, so we went to a different vendor next time we ordered. But nothing compares to the smooth glide, the perfect-sized rubber end stylus, or the satisfying click of the old ones. I regret every day that I didn’t swipe any from our old warehouse. There are no more to be found in any supply closets, but those of us who remember the days of the Good Pens will descend on any that turn up like vultures on a carcass. If a long-timer leaves, we’re scavenging their supplies for Good Pens.

  48. Ultegra*

    My office provides branded pens. We used to purchase them in black, blue, and red, but about 3 years ago our supplier stopped carrying the blue and red pens. They still carry the blue and red cartridges though. Instead of switching suppliers, the powers that be have told us to take a black pen, remove the black cartridge, and replace it with a blue or red cartridge to make blue or red pen. Ever since then, the old branded pens with proper colored red or blue barrels have become a status symbol. If someone accidentally leaves behind a red or blue barreled pen in an office or conference room, they will never see it again. All of this could be remedied if we switched suppliers or even pen style, but someone higher up has chosen not to.

  49. Lucia Pacciola*

    Reams of printer paper. As a monitor stand.

    I think at this point it’s been literally years since anyone actually used the printer on our floor. For anything work-related, at least.

    1. Kivrin*

      I used a hole punch in my home office two or three times a week — I’m not a fan of binders generally but it’s the only system I have found works for me for bookkeeping — for some reason keeping this year’s and last year’s bank statements and invoices in a binder keeps my head above water. I got rid of the electric one, though.

  51. uniManager*

    Chalk.

    I work at a university department in a STEM field. The absolute uproar that occurred when the high-end chalk from a specific manufacturer in Asia was no longer available to our required vendor was epic. The company that made it went bankrupt and it wasn’t available for nearly a year while another company bought it out and reconfigured manufacturing. There was mass hysteria including individuals making hoarder-level purchases of existing supply and requesting reimbursement (not allowed), near fist-fights over boxes of the stuff, and existing department supply had to be kept under lock and key lest it grow legs and walk off. Staff were reportedly brought to the point of tears over this.

    Once it was available again, our required vendor could not stock it. There were resolutions from the faculty committee to petition the vendor, complaints filed with the purchasing department, and regular demands sent for this particular brand of chalk. We still cannot purchase it legally (within policy), and staff still receive requests for boxes of it and reimbursement requests for self-purchase (still not allowed).

    There is a tiny loophole we now use to secure a small amount of the stuff through another vendor, and we can only give it out 2-3 sticks at a time and only to faculty. Supply still remains under lock and key, to be distributed by authorized personnel only.

      1. uniManager*

        Yes! That’s the one. I wasn’t in the department when this all went down, but the stories that remain (and the reasons why we are so sparing with it now) are the stuff of legend.

      1. Dr. Doll*

        It writes smooth as cream, *bright* contrast on the board, and erases completely without ghosts. I bought my own box so I never have to teach with crappy cheap sticks again.

        It makes wonderful gifts for engineers and math teachers in your life.

  52. Heather*

    The Scantron Machine. nearly everyone uses online tetsing programs or uses paper that has digital/photo grading. The Scantron company technically owns the machine so we cannot get rid of it. Interestingly, the 20 year old supply order for scantrons still gets sent out yearly even though no one is using them. I did an informal poll and the last person that used the scantron machine did it in 2019.

    1. Mergatroid*

      I came here to say the Scantron papers. There were PILES of that when I moved into my classroom. There were probably several hundred thousand of them thangs, as they were the only things in the 5 drawers of my desk. In the year of our Current Era 2022.

      They told us “don’t throw anything away. We’ll send custodial to pick things up.” Did they send custodial to pick things up. Of course not! Hahaha, what is that, logical?

      So after a few months of those sitting by the trashcan, I placed them IN the trashcan, and they went away. I haven’t heard boo about them.

    2. Knighthope*

      About 15 years ago a porch pirate in my neighborhood apparently was mightily disappointed to discover that the purloined package contained only scantron forms, which a neighbor found discarded in the alley.

  53. Law librarian*

    Several years ago I worked for a law firm where it had been decreed from upon high that we weren’t allowed to buy post-it notes because they were a waste of money. At the time, all the legal database providers gave branded post its as freebies and were happy to give me extra so I had an endless supply of them. I was extremely popular.

    1. Coffee Protein Drink*

      That was 1994 or so. I don’t know if this person took it upon themselves to do the math, but one day I came in to find a report about the expense of post-it-notes vs that of using scratch paper and paper clips.

      No more post-it notes in that office unless we brought in our own.

  54. RandomLawyer*

    The Fax Machine. The only people still using it were using it to send documents to other department WITHIN THE SAME BUILDING. They needed the fax confirmation page to “have proof they sent the document.” Even explaining to them they could scan the document and e-mail it to us, and the sent e-mail would be said proof was unavailing. It took 18 months of haggling at all levels of the organization (and honestly the intervention of quarantine leaving no one around to actually see the faxes coming in) to finally FINALLY stop the practice of faxing documents within the building.

    1. Lurker*

      This is amazing. It reminds me of when I worked for the Smithsonian and there was some department/person who would only *accept* faxes, but not send faxes. Someone else was in charge of sending. Just one example of the soul-crushing bureaucracy there.

      Maybe once a year I do use a fax machine to send something to the IRS. They don’t accept forms by email so it’s either fax or snail mail.

      1. Jay (no, the other one)*

        I just had to fax something yesterday – a prescription to a nursing facility. They don’t accept them by Email and are not on the electronic prescribing system. This is why we still have prescription pads and a fax machine. I had a fax machine for years so I could do this from home when I was on call. Got rid of it the day I signed off call for the last time.

        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          Fax is more secure than email. That’s why it’s used for medical or financial documents that aren’t sent through post or a secure portal.

    2. Tio*

      When I worked in logistics, we had a trucker that said he needed the fax number to send over something for a job. I told him we didn’t have one. He hemmed and hawed, what ever shall I do? I informed him that in these incredibly advanced times (2016) we have something called scanning and emailing. He claimed HE didn’t have a scanner so he couldn’t. I told him “well, I know you have a truck, so I guess you’ll have to drive it over.”

      Weirdly, he managed to locate a scanner and send the email. (Fun side note: We had a combo fax machine/printer, but the fax function was unreliable and I didn’t know the number, and also it was 2016, so I just lied.)

    3. Industry Behemoth*

      In the early 1990s I temped for a hospital, and doctors were starting to get fax machines which were the greatest thing since sliced bread. The biggest plus for them was lab results.

      In a different vein, an admin at a past employer had to deal with a professional who kept saying they hadn’t received something the admin sent them through interoffice mail. The admin resorted to sending everything to this person by way of our copy center, because the copy center’s delivery would include a printed confirmation.

      I also heard long ago about a company whose interoffice mail was so bad, people were FedEx-ing internal memos.

  55. Q*

    Pens, notepads, Clorox wipes. The wipes thing was so bad that in about 2009, NOT 2020 (when it might have made more sense), one of the admins and I were distributing the latest case of Clorox…One person started a bet about how long they’d last and someone announced rather loudly “We all know who’s stealing them. I’m watching you.”

  56. anon for this*

    We had this stapler that my boss was weirdly possessive of. If you temporarily brought it to your desk, for example, he would angrily say that the stapler was for everyone to use, so it must be kept in its assigned spot (even while being used).

    So we played a trick on him. We had the machine shop guys punch a hole in a new, identical identical stapler and chained it to the table with a lock. We hid the original stapler in one of boss’s desk drawers. Long story short he was very angry (he had pretty bad anger management issues), borrowed bolt cutters to cut the chain off, did not get the point of the joke, didn’t seem to register that there were now two staplers, and wanted to know who was involved.

  57. They Call Me Patricia*

    We had a two-hole punch that sat by the copier for 16 years. It was labeled “Susan’s” so nobody was allowed to use it or take it. Our office had no employee named Susan. Nobody who worked there could even remember a past employee named Susan. When the company was bought out and we moved, there was debate over what to do with Susan’s hole punch. There was no Susan!

    1. Not Your Mother*

      In case Alison sees this and decides to use it, may I suggest as its title: “A hole punch named Sue.”

    2. PanhandleQueen*

      When I sat close to the copier, back in the dark ages, I had a note on my two-hole punch that said “Removal of this hole punch from Debbie’s desk will result in grievous bodily harm.” Also, in the 1980s, the new job I went to did not use 2-hole punches for files. They used those brass doodads which you spread the legs of to secure the papers. My attorney boss was thrilled to learn (a) 2-hole punch machines existed, and (b) there were specific fasteners to secure the hole-punched documents. When I moved away, he told me that the thing he would remember most gratefully about me was that I introduced him to the two-hole punch.

  58. Heather*

    Found a 20+ year old book scanner with av cables and a spiral bound book for directions. It had been marked, “Old Scanner” and was up on a high cabinet shelf.

  59. And another thing*

    Scissors: our supervisor got the whole team really nice kitchen shears to take home in December, in the hopes that maybe the scissors would stop going missing in the communal areas! (To be honest I think the scissors are just not being put back, not taken home)

  60. Forty Feet*

    My office has been working on digitizing all of our processes that used to require printing out dozens of pages of data. For large packets of data, we used to either three-hole-punch them to put them in binders or use the heavy duty stapler to bind them. Even though we’re almost done transitioning to digital documentation, we still have the giant three-hole punches and the heavy duty staplers. The kicker is that both of our communal heavy duty staplers are broken, yet there are those who REFUSE to throw them out because “we may need them!”. At this point we’re waiting for the holdouts to retire so we can dispose of the broken staplers in peace.

  61. sara*

    Nothing now but I worked for years at a non-profit though where you had to give an accounting code to the admin for even a pen or pencil, and also get judged for having the audacity to have used up the pen you got two years ago… Heaven forbid you ask for several pens for your team at the same time or something. And the drama to get new whiteboard markers? Goodness… Also to note, this was a messy/dirty job where we had to also fill out a lot of daily or hourly paper records on clipboards.

    My boss asked me one time to go grab a box of pens (like the cheapo ones) from them, and when I came back with 6 pens (because there’s 6 full-time people on my team, why would I possibly need more pens than that?), we ended up just ordering our own supplies until the person down there retired…

    Now I work at a 99% paperless tech company and there’s just a giant cabinet filled with coloured pens, markers, post-its, notebooks, etc. It took me a couple years to realize that I didn’t have to ask anyone, or log my GL code to sign things out. And as someone who really needs to draw logic out on paper sometimes, I love it so much.

  62. SbuxAddict*

    Adding machine/Calculator paper tape and certain paperclips are our big hoarded items

    The bookkeepers hoard the calculator tape and the payroll department will often raid their supply because the main office supply closet is always empty. You can tell when this is about to happen because a payroll person will dawdle until all the bookkeepers have left then go raid the bottom drawers in the bookkeepers’ desks. This leads to many emails admonishing people store only ONE EXTRA ROLL in their office. Always in caps and with an attitude.

    The bookkeeping department only likes small paperclips with the little bumps on them. No one else cares. One of the local tellers is a family member of one of the admins and she will send us tons of the paperclips the bank collects when people drop off their deposits in the overnight slots. The bank would otherwise throw them out so every three months or so, we get a about 1500 free paperclips of all shapes and sizes. When the box arrives, the bookkeepers go through it and take all the bumpy small paperclips. If I get work from them with a paperclip, it will often include a note saying, “Please return this clip with the papers.”

    They don’t like it, btw, when you return the papers and clip with a note saying, “Here is your precious” with a photo of Golum. I learned that the hard way.

  63. Sharkie*

    I worked for an company that kept all the digital copies of their projects on the giant floppy discs from the 80’s . This was in 2018. When I was hired I got a new computer set up, and they had to custom order a large floppy disk reader so I can access the files I needed. Yes it was super expensive. No my boss didnt want to upload copies to the server because that was to “dangerous” and digital copies can get deleted. When I explained that it since these discs are so old they might start breaking down soon by Boss was baffled, since he bought all of the discs in 1985 and the unused ones look brand new, just a bit faded.

    We also didn’t get wifi until the CEO visited our office and he had to plug in his computer to get internet.

  64. Scott*

    I’m gonna go with the FAX machine in my office. It was useful a decade or so ago to handle things that contained somewhat sensitive information (think proprietary) but we have had computer systems available for this information for at least that long. I will admit that I have used it several times in the last few years. Why? you may ask. There is a local deli in the District with great sandwiches that does not have online ordering but for large orders you can FAX a form. I’ve ordered upwards of two dozen sandwiches for training events from them.
    It was fun showing some young colleagues how to use the machine as most had never seen one.

  65. Clippy*

    I just had my 10-year work anniversary in the accounting department in local government and the entire time I’ve been here we’ve NEVER had to order paper clips. I don’t know what the prior employee I replaced was doing but we have moved twice in ten years, are preparing for another move in a few months and I am still finding unopened boxes of paper clips.

  66. Inbetweener*

    I work for a government funded non-profit organization, so we have a very strict budget we have to adhere to for office supplies. This makes a lot of our supplies hot commodities, but especially binders. We provide binders for our learners to keep handouts and important paperwork in, that they then get to keep after they are finished with our services. Since we offer a variety of on-going services, we don’t have the budget to provide binders to every learner that comes through our door. This has led to our director deciding that only one of our programs gets priority on binders since it runs the longest and provides the most paperwork. I happen to be the instructor for this particular program, meaning I get weekly visits from co-workers wanting binders for their learners. I have had people try to bribe me with coffee, treats and gift cards in order to get some of my binders! It’s all so funny to me, and in reality, we could just order less pencils (we have boxes and boxes of pencils) and use that money to buy more binders.

  67. Three Flowers*

    Old-school wood pencils. My former boss provided me with an array of nice branded office supplies when I started four years ago…but I don’t think there’s a pencil sharpener in the building. They are desk decor.

    Also, when a former colleague involuntarily departed and refused to clean out his desk, we eventually had to do it for him because we needed the office. We found so. many. file folders. Most had exactly one document in them, weren’t labeled, and were stacked in drawers rather than hanging in those file-hanging folders. It was the detritus of a totally non-functional compulsion. (On the plus side, we are no longer constantly out of file folders.)

  68. Just Here for the Free Lunch*

    There was a short period of time in my department where our VP decided that it was too dangerous to have sharp scissors. All pointed scissors were confiscated and replaced with blunt-nosed (like they use in kindergarten classes). People literally hid their pointed scissors in their offices until the whole thing blew over.

  69. Cupcake*

    Engineers and their favorite mechanical pencils and calculators. I worked as admin to a team of engineers and the specific preferences of each one made me laugh. The head/director liked one pencil that was not always easy to order, so I kept a spare in my desk, hidden, so he would have a secret spare.

    1. Jay (no, the other one)*

      Serious crossword solvers are also very specific about pencils. VERY specific. There are arguments.

      1. periwinkle*

        Logic puzzle enthusiasts, too. I carefully hoard my supply of Ticonderoga #1 wood pencils.

      2. Seven If You Count Bad John*

        Crosswords should be done in Bic. I will not be entertaining other arguments.

          1. Seven If You Count Bad John*

            I’m agnostic on color. I prefer black but I’ll use blue or green or whatever. Gotta be Bic though.

  70. GelieFish*

    at my previous job (local government) I was responsible for ordering. I was informed of the specific requirements for pens. The had to be clickable (police don’t do lids), see through (council members wanted to be able to see how much ink was left) and blue (back in the day when that told you it was an original signature)

  71. juliebulie*

    We had a lot of office supplies from prehistoric times. Like even the 1960s. Colored pencils (no longer used, bearing imprints of pencil manufacturers that no longer exist), transparencies for a projector (no projector in house), telephone accessories such as that thing you use to perch the receiver on your shoulder, no longer needed as we have soft phones. Tracing paper, sticky spray for paste-ups which we haven’t done since the early 90s.

    I feel like I’m forgetting something. Just look into any supply cabinet from the 20th century and you’ll see what I mean.

    1. Seven If You Count Bad John*

      I actually need one of those shoulder things now. The place I work now had to run a new land line in so I could answer the phone at my desk, and unearthed this incredible artifact from the mid-90’s from storage. I also have to write messages on actual paper message slips, so I need to do the shoulder/neck thing with the handset.

  72. CzechMate*

    Blue gel pens. For anyone who works in an office where you frequently have to physically sign official documents, the blue gel pens are worth their weight in gold. Can you sign just as easily with a cheap Bic blue pen? Of course. Do you want to? Absolutely not. They don’t glide across the signature line nearly as smoothly. They don’t feel nearly as comfortable in my grubby little bureaucratic hands.

    My work frequently entails sitting with people as they sign official documents, and the complete rage I’ve seen when an unwitting client accidentally (or purposefully?) leaves with a blue gel pen is wild. The front desk has a jar with a big, all-caps sign telling people to RETURN PENS HERE. If that doesn’t work, the front desk admin will pointedly tell people, “It looks like you forgot to return your pen!!” But that’s only as a last resort–really, the nice blue gel pens have historically been kept in a secret panel by a fireplace (it’s a refurbed Victorian building) out of reach of clients, with cheap, plastic, unworthy Bic pens are typically left out for members of the public.

  73. Madame Señora*

    I refuse to get rid of the overhead projector in my classroom. 99.9% of the time, it’s a plant stand. But every once in a while, maybe once a semester, I pull it out and use it to teach a lesson. The students actually pay way closer attention than usual just because of the novelty of this retrograde technology. I have a huge hoard of acetates so I’ll probably not run out of them before I retire.

    1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      My 8th grade math teacher had an endless roll of acetate attached to her overhead projector. Probably 100 feet long. That was the only thing she used. She always had a damp cloth so she could crank to the next spot and clean off anything old there. And then she could crank back if somebody had a question and show the stuff she wrote at the beginning of the class.

      1. Silver Robin*

        honestly, I love those projectors. Had them in middle school and then in high school we started using smart boards. The overhead projectors were better, though I admit the early days of adoptions are not the smoothest so smartboards are likely much better now. But the risk of using a whiteboard marker on a hugely expensive piece of equipment just did not exist with the projectors! :P

    2. Odonata*

      I think we have three working projectors in our building, guarded zealously by our head librarian – because when you need them, there’s no substitute. Tracing an outline of an image onto a wall for a mural? Or as you say, capturing the attention of some restless 17 year olds?

      My favourite use is for a set of glass slides, dating from the 40’s? which were used by the American military as a colourblindness test. They’ve got a couple of cracks, and I’m not confident that the colours are still true… but I haul them out every year, and will until I retire or die in the traces.

  74. Pretty as a Princess*

    We have a freebie book shelf tucked into a corner in a common area. It’s where people can clean out books from their offices (like when they move space or retire, because no one here ever just proactively gets rid of books). I periodically walk by and just take one of the books and throw it in the kitchen trash, because no one is actually going to take home the HTML for Dummies book that was on the shelf for a month.

    We are a place that does computering things. So all the books are old books about various aspects of computerings. One month I found a book about menopause on the shelf.

  75. ConstantlyComic*

    I’ll admit to being a culprit here, as I have been waging passive-aggressive warfare for about a year over one color of paper while we were adjusting the procedures for one particular report that we had to complete daily and submit to another department. For a while the report used several identical forms, so it made sense to color-code the most important one. We had a peach-colored paper that fit the purpose nicely, but that I was never particularly fond of (we had to photocopy filled-out forms, and photocopying colored paper onto white paper always looks hideous, in my opinion).

    A while later, we received clarification from the other department that they only needed the most important copy of that particular form and we could stop sending the other ones. Great! That eliminates the need for color-coding, right? Well, I said something to that effect and one coworker looked at me like I’d suggested leaving all the windows open in a hurricane.

    Apparently in her mind the ugly peach paper that we’d only been using for a short time was now absolutely vital to this report. How else, she reasoned, would the other department know which form was the important one (besides being the only copy of that form and stapled to the front of the report)? How would they know the report had come from us (besides having our branch’s name on it in big letters)? Any suggestion I made for saving ink and having better-looking reports was immediately shot down, even when we got a new printer that didn’t preserve the color on the copies anyway.

    I am not proud of this, but I did eventually end up going to my supervisor and presenting my argument for why it didn’t make sense to keep using the peach paper. He agreed and announced at an all-staff meeting that once we finished the current supply of peach forms, we would go back to printing that form on normal paper. Unfortunately, my coworker, despite being present at that meeting, seems to have expunged this from her mind, as I made a passing mention of going back to regular-colored forms and she said “What? When did we agree to do that?” So alas, the saga of the peach forms is still ongoing.

  76. K.l.*

    Compressed air to clean out keyboards; one of the admins kept a can “hidden” on her desk so that you’d have to ask her for it. She once asked me what I needed it for, and when I told her it was to clean out the new hire keyboards, she gave me the can, but only after saying “ok… some people like to huff this stuff so need to be careful”

    1. Broken Lawn Chair*

      IME that’s not where it goes. It’s just fun to use, and if something is very dirty it can take half a can, so the stuff just doesn’t last that long.

      1. Blarg*

        I watched a guy huffing a can of duster in the alley behind the Office Depot that used to be on Colfax in central Denver once. Then he got on his bike and rode away. A really indelible memory.

      2. JustaTech*

        I have a friend who got a nasty cold burn from a lab-mate who thought it would be funny to use a can of compressed air to freeze the tag on her shirt.
        He was not allowed to use the compressed air again.

  77. Gila Monster*

    My workplace insists on ordering regular and legal-sized printer paper at a 1:1 ratio. Except nobody uses legal paper, and yet they won’t order more paper until most of the paper is gone. This leads to a) hoarding of regular sized paper, and b) people trying to find more places to tuck away legal sized paper so that The Powers That Be will see that we’re low and order more.

  78. Cupcake*

    BATTERIES! I have worked in two separate offices where they keep batteries under lock and key! The staff generally need batteries for keyboards, mice, remote controls, etc. In both workplaces there were power tripping office managers that insisted if the batteries were just available in the cabinet, the staff just walk off with them. I suspect that some people bought their own batteries rather than deal with the Battery Key Masters!

    1. Lurker*

      I kind of get this. Batteries are expensive and probably get stolen a lot for personal devices (remotes, toys, etc).

    2. Beancounter Eric*

      Yep. Rodent uses AA, keyboard AAA. I brought in a pack of each from home.

      Easier than tracking down IT or whomever has the company supply,

    3. Not a Penguin*

      We are not allowed to keep batteries at the workplace! They might start a fire, I guess? But if you are found with batteries in your locker, you might lose access to have a locker.

      This is a normal office job with hot desking, so no permanent assignments to desks.

      The admins don’t have them either.

    4. Susie Occasionally Fun*

      When I first started at one of my jobs, all of the computer mice went through batteries like crazy. No one could figure it out. We were all asked to make sure our mice were switched off at night and over weekends. Our admin ordered us new mice. They still ate through batteries at the rate of new batteries every 7–10 days. If it had been one or two mice, it would have just been bad equipment. But this seemed to affect everyone. Nothing helped until we moved to rechargeable mice. That solved the issue, but we never did figure out what caused it.

  79. the Viking Diva*

    The previous directors were scroungers and savers, and we have done multiple rounds of purging. That said, there are a few things I too can’t bear to toss out, such as a mighty three-hole punch, a beautiful old postage scale, and the set of rubber stamps once used in sorting the mail, which just make me giggle when I find them again. And I will defend the binful of cables as long as I can triumphantly pull out the very one that is needed to suck data from one elderly device to another!

  80. azvlr*

    As an E-4 (enlisted/peon) in the US Navy, the department heads (officers) would come to the admin office for the morning meeting with the Command Officer. A couple of them would always make themselves at home at my desk before the meeting if I was not sitting there when they arrived. They would use the phone, doodle all over my desk calendar, and often “borrow” my pen (which they never returned after the meeting.
    In the military, various colored in is reserved for the different signatures in the approval chain: blue for the department head, green for the XO and red for the CO’s signature. I removed the ink tube from a red pen and added a black one instead. I may have also sabotaged my desk in other ways to keep it from being taken over. I kept the same pen for many months and enjoyed a nice clean desk calendar where I could easily read my schedule.

    1. Scott*

      This brings back memories of many documents I submitted up the C of C that came back with a lot of colored (usually green) ink. I always included the previous version with the edits along with the revised version so I could show the XO something was changed because he directed it. This was especially helpful when he wanted to change something to the wording I had originally used.

  81. Snow Globe*

    After college, I started work with a large company. One of my jobs: monthly there was an executive committee meeting , and I had to make copies and collate a package full of reports. Then I put each package in a 4-inch 3-ring binder, stacked the binders on a cart and delivered them throughout the building to all the managers.

    Over the years, I stayed with the company, but moved around to many different departments. The department I started with was eventually cut, and other groups moved in and out of that location. About 25 years later I ended up back in the same place, different department. When I went to look for something in the supply room, I found about twenty empty binders, the same ones that had been in use many years ago (and probably hadn’t been touched in a decade). Also, several stacks of 3-hole copy paper.

  82. MelMc*

    I’ll confess to a box of carbon paper at the back of my desk. It’s used less often than once a year but I’ve never found a good work-around when it’s needed.

  83. PandaQueue*

    I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned yet, but dry erase markers are literally like endangered animals at my office. Almost every room has a whiteboard, but none of the rooms have dry erase markers that stay in the room. Now every person has to carry their own set of markers and eraser(!) to each room they have a meeting in. And we’re in IT. We’re constantly whiteboarding ideas. I’ve taken a sharpie and labelled my dry erase marker set because they kept disappearing.

    1. bamcheeks*

      and omg will you be in trouble if you use a flipchart marker instead! I have done that twice and had to go to Facilities to explain and apologise.

      1. Midwest Manager*

        Rubbing alcohol will get the sharpie off the whiteboard! (don’t ask how I know this…)

      2. just a random teacher*

        You can get Wrong Markers off of a whiteboard the following ways:

        + Most kinds (including permanent markers), you can color over with a whiteboard marker and then erase
        + Crayola washable markers: the above trick won’t work, but washing with water will

        (I learned that second one during a year when a poorly-supervised after school program used my classroom. They broke or damaged so much of my stuff, and never seemed to understand why I was upset about it or that perhaps they needed to treat the space differently and/or buy their own supplies. The marker thing was actually really useful knowledge once I figured it out since it let me have semi-permanent lines and labels on my board that would wash off when I wanted to change things up.)

    2. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

      Basically this, but at my home and WFH office. We have steel doors so magnetic whiteboards and dry erase magnets are plastered all over them, along with my office whiteboard and glass dry erase board. It’s taken me literally months to find the perfect set of whiteboard markers that are properly vibrant/opaque and have a fine tip. But one day I forgot to hide them when my niece and nephew came over to visit and one thing they love to do is draw all over the blank whiteboards. Kids are, let’s say not gentle, on dry erase markers. And they use them like crayons. When they left, the fine tips were all smashed in well enough they were no longer usable.

      I now have a decoy set of dollar store dry erase markers set out within reach for them to destroy to their hearts’ content while my perfect markers are safely stowed in the office.

      Swap out kids for coworkers and dry erase markers for highlighters and that’s how it went down when I used to work onsite and why I have a bucket of highlighters with my name labeled on each one.

    3. Festively Dressed Earl*

      Dry erase markers were hard currency during law school, especially during midterms/finals. A fresh set of EXPOs could get you into any study group, because otherwise you’d have to organize a marker-boosting caper to one of the other study rooms trying to find a functional felt tip when no one was looking.

    4. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      As a department admin, I kept an IKEA blue bag full of meeting supplies (particularly including a full set of whiteboard markers) under my desk, for the use of the department so if they landed in a meeting room in hostile territory they would have the right stuff. With a list of the intended contents on the wiki so I could restock it as needed.

      As Facilities at another place, I would load-balance the whiteboard markers between conference rooms, so every room had at least one black marker and at least two markers of other colors. I tried for black, warm color, and cool color, and tested them for function weekly.

  84. SpaceySteph*

    Our floor had ONE laminating machine. We didn’t need to laminate very much, but there were times.

    An admin designated herself keeper of the laminating machine. She kept the machine on her desk and all the lamination pages under lock and key in her desk drawer so you had to ask her for a lamination sheet (the plastic sleeve that the machine melts to your paper in order to laminate), and if she was out of the office, no lamination could be done until she returned. The detail required to justify her bestowing you a lamination sheet was also extensive.

  85. FG*

    Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I was the admin for a small academic department. My pens kept disappearing. People – faculty, grad students, undergrads – would pick up my pen, presumably to use on the spot, and just not return it.

    So, one day I made a label for the barrel of the pen out of a trimmed yellow post-it & laminated it to the pen with scotch tape. It had a drawing of a skull & said, “FG’s Death Pen – Do Not Use.” I never had any pen loss after that.

  86. DMLOKC*

    We had a receptionist who did a great job of controlling all office supplies. She kept the bare minimum of the all supplies — the least expensive available — and saved a lot of money. It was a challenge to get a pen, or a good mechanical pencil. HR had a staff meeting and asked what the team’s biggest frustrations were. Most people said the lack of office supplies. HR told the receptionist to immediately fill all the supply drawers and cabinets with quality pens, pencils, whatever the team wanted. You couldn’t get the drawers open they were so full. HR thought it was a small price to pay to make everyone happy and more engaged. It worked.

  87. Riggs*

    Electronics equipment – That monitor is too dim and has been on that shelf for five years, and those cables are old enough that they don’t connect to anything anymore, but we can’t throw them away because we might need them!! (I’ll admit I’m somewhat guilty of this myself too…)

  88. SunriseRuby*

    Hey, OP of the letter from January 2023, “My ex-boss threatened to contact my husband, his coworkers, and my father-in-law if I don’t return $48 of office supplies”, are you out there? Because of the subject of this discussion, there was a link to your letter. So much fun to re-read! If you’re reading this, could you share some updates about following up with your old company about this, and about your bananacrackers ex-boss?

  89. Midwest Manager*

    We have about 30 of those long wooden boards with tabs for each letter of the alphabet to assist when sorting a large quantity of papers into A-Z order. We have digitized 95% of our work, and no longer manually alphabetize anything – haven’t for nearly a decade. I have tried to throw them out multiple times over the years and yet they keep reappearing in the supply closet.

    I’ve decided they’re cursed and cannot be removed from their current location. Maybe it’s time to call in a supernatural specialist…

    1. Dancing Otter*

      They used to make something similar to sort by dates, or maybe the same ones with numeric markings in addition to the letters. AP departments frequently used them to organize invoices by due date.

      Having facilitated on numerous system upgrades, I promise every accounting system from QuickBooks on up will track invoice dates, either by storing vendor terms or by entry from each invoice. And probably run lovely reports of cash flow projections, to boot.

      And yet, some pathetic accounting clerk somewhere has a metaphoric death-grip on that sorter “just in case the system fails.” How they think sorting invoices manually will enable them to make payments if the entire accounting system is down, I don’t know. Maybe make the CFO hand-sign checks they’ve typed by hand?

  90. Morbid Maddie*

    This is possibly gross and slightly too far off topic, but….

    My dad was a funeral director, and I spent a lot of my childhood hanging around the small funeral home where he worked. In the office! In the break room! Occasionally in the overflow seating area! But nowhere with bodies! For the record. The first time I saw a staple remover was in my dad’s office, and I did not know what it was at all. When he noticed me staring fixedly at it, he scooped it into a drawer. Now I assume he didn’t want six-year-old me to hurt myself with it. At the time, I assumed staple removers must be inappropriate for kids because they have to do with dead bodies.

    After some consideration, I concluded it was for embalming eyeballs and called, obviously, an eyeball embalmer. Somehow I just never revisited this designation or noticed my teachers using one or whatever.

    Ten years later I had a summer job filing in a law office. I was handed a staple remover, yelped, and threw it against a wall. I asked why they had one. They asked what I was talking about. There was uproarious laughter. I’m still embarrassed, and the office staff there, lo these many years later, still call them eyeball embalmers.

    2. Silver Robin*

      I *love* stories like this. Low stakes childhood assumptions that never have the opportunity to be questioned till you are way too old not to know better are a true delight.

      Had a friend in college who told us how she thought pickles grew in swamps. No idea where she got that idea and she was not disabused of that notion till a friend of hers in high school mentioned going to a swamp during a trip. The conversation apparently went something like:
      “Going to [region] over break! They have a swamp.”
      “Oh,” my friend asks, “will you get any pickles?”
      “No…? Why?”
      “Well, pickles grow in swamps so I thought you might go pick some.”
      “….”
      “…do pickles *not* grow in swamps?”
      [uproarious laughter]

      1. Docently Well-Informed*

        Um, actually we have something called “pickle weed”–and it’s edible– that does grow in saltwater wetlands around here… (but definitely not to Vlasic size!)

  91. Blarg*

    I worked at an office supply big box store in the late 90s. Our coveted item:

    The laminator. Only the people deemed worthy by the copy center crew were allowed to touch it. I adored that thing. Big outside jobs: I was on it. Any piece of paper I deemed worthy? Also laminated. Those were the days.

    Also, the shrink wrap heat gun which was really just a hair dryer kinda thing. I also loved to shrink wrap stuff that was opened.

    These may have just been my things. Maybe I was weird. I did love that job. Miss you, chain store that was subsumed by another, similarly named chain store chain!

    1. SpaceySteph*

      They make shrink wrap you can use with a regular hair dryer too. My mom was a very active volunteer of a nonprofit and a few times we were tasked with making gift baskets for fundraisers. Blasting those with a hair dryer was a good time!

    2. Midwest Manager*

      When I worked in a big box copy center, I always volunteered for the shrink wrapping part of the job. SO SATISFYING! I *may* have purposely wrecked a wrapping or two just to do it again….

  92. Jennifer C.*

    I was working for a government agency, and we weren’t allowed to accept gifts from vendors. The agency ordered a bunch of computers and received a travel mug with the Dell logo on it as part of the shipment.

    Everyone was too scared of the ethics rules to do anything with the travel mug. It sat on top of a file cabinet for months and months, untouched. When I asked about it, I was sternly told to leave it alone.

    I finally just took it when no one was looking and brought it home.

  93. LadyAmalthea*

    There is a 1989-1993 vintage floppy disk in one of the office stationary cabinets. Because I work in a government office and there are strict rules around archives, we can’t really through it away. I take it out when I’m training someone under the age of 40 on our mostly DOS based financial management system so that they know exactly why the save button looks the way it does.

    1. Relic*

      That’s so cool that you 3D printed the save icon!

      But how did you print the folder icon? I have never seen a paper 3D printer before? Wow, you should patent that!

  94. Cactus_Song*

    I had a former colleague who had an absolute meltdown when the admin team suggested getting rid of our old shredder since we had a weekly shredding pick up service. I don’t know if she just loved the satisfaction of shredding documents in the old shredder or didn’t trust the pick-up service, but she threw such a fit that we kept the old shredder until she eventually left. Of course, she never volunteered to help clean/empty out the old shredder – the admin team had to continue doing that. She was in her 20s, not in the compliance department, didn’t work with any hugely confidential documents. She was just an associate who loved any excuse to use that old shredder.

  95. Annony*

    Colored sticky notes. My organization decided that we were no longer allowed to order any sticky notes except the yellow ones. If you tried, you were redirected to the yellow ones. People went insane and worked very hard to find work arounds. Someone managed to find colored sticky notes on amazon that were not blocked and there was a rush to stock up before the organization figured it out and blocked those too.

  96. Jen*

    I’m a teacher who (in 2023) moved into a new classroom. The retired teacher was a little bit of an educational materials hoarder, and was tasked by the principal to dumpster things. She did a pretty good job: my cupboards were basically empty, the bookshelves only held paperbacks the kids might actually want to read. EXCEPT, she could not be persuaded to throw away the VHS tapes she showed as part of her curriculum. People actually talked to her about it. I’ve inherited VHS tapes, but no VHS machine, obviously. Did she imagine that I would run out and buy a VHS player to hook to my smart board? To watch episodes of National Geographic that I can stream from my laptop?

  97. Nay*

    In my office it is binder clips! The admin assistant who orders supplies has been told not to order anymore because apparently we were spending A LOT of money on them, but she still has people ask her for them all the time! We don’t use a lot of paper around here, but, they do make nice chip clips…

    1. Elly*

      they are also great for hanging seasonal banners or lights onto cubes without doing damage. And the super large ones be used to hang your headphones on!

  98. OlympiasEpiriot*

    This is the inverse.

    I moved firms during the lockdown. I went from a very old school office that definitely was current on its computers, but, not entirely on its filing methods. Still had a reference library, for example.

    New place had 2 years before gone through a wholesale transfer to electronic-based everything, open office, hot-desking plan with laptops only. I still take notes in a bound book and like to do thinking sketches on paper with a pencil. It is a very different thing than doing it on a screen for me. A few days in to my tenure here, I needed to sharpen a colored pencil. I wandered the office (I was working on site, much easier for me) looking for a sharpener. I found 1 on the entire floor. The floor covers an entire city block.

  99. bamcheeks*

    I actually need Compliments slips in my current role (sending out hard-copy marketing materials), and we cannot work out whether they still exist and who in the organisation would know! I had to explain what they were to my twentysomething assistant. They used to be in every office in an organisation, alongside the window envelopes, non-window envelopes and memo pads!

  100. Seven If You Count Bad John*

    I haven’t been here long enough to know if it’s completely cultural, but apparently this office simply doesn’t buy certain types of supplies—like pens. So I predict that I personally am going to become a pen stealer and hoarder. (Yes, this is ridiculous. There should be a couple of boxes of basic Bic pens next to the file folders and reams of paper and I have no idea why they’re such cheapskates about this.)

  101. Stapler Lady*

    This is the story about how two grown adults got very intense about staplers.

    We had no stapler in the office and this was inconvenient. One of the bosses popped out and came back with two different staplers, and placed them on my desk and the desk of the guy opposite as we were pretty central in the office. Little did he know, but he had just started what we called “Stapler Wars”.

    Every time that people wanted to staple something, we would compete for their business, loudly and enthusiastically pitching the virtues of our particular stapler. We spent quite a lot of time in between playfully arguing about which stapler was better or gloating about recent wins. The poor people who just wanted their paper stapled were frequently baffled and faintly stressed out by this but we had a lot of fun.

    Frankly this was not the only harmless antics we got up to in this office (my favourite mug died in a game of office cricket, played using keyboards for the bat). We had a lot of fun but unfortunately between getting promoted into more senior roles and working from home our work lives are now significantly duller, but we still like to talk about the good old days when we were young and silly.

    1. Stapler Lady*

      I should also note that I still have my stapler which is genuinely a really good stapler (and obviously better than its rival!)

  102. Unlocked memory!*

    I worked at a traditionally underfunded university, although by the time I arrived it was in slightly better shape. I had two colleagues, though, who Never Forgot the dark times and hoarded boxes of paper. They had a shared office and had shoved the boxes of paper under and around their desks, like some weird letter paper fort. Over time, our boss convinced them to liberate a box of paper now and then and integrate it into the general office supply. (It’s worth noting in my decade plus, we never had a request for more paper declined.) It took about 7 years, but by the time the second one retired, all the boxes were gone. I did a final sweep of the office space to make sure the space was ready to be turned over to someone else, and noted that the office door actually didn’t swing all the way open. What could be behind it?

    Reader, I discovered a 5 foot stack of unboxed, sheets of paper.

  103. Snarkus Aurelius*

    I’ve previously written about an old coworker, Nancy, who worked two jobs (one at our organization and one at a grocery store) during the workweek. She’d tell us she was “working from home,” but when I went to buy groceries on my day off, I saw her at the cash register. She refused to acknowledge me or make any eye contact. (This was in 2002 when work from home wasn’t a thing.)

    Nancy loved to buy office supplies. She was one of the coveted few who had their own Staples credit card. She’d come back with rollaway briefcases, high end organizers, monitor stands, calligraphy pens (that no one would ever use), leather shoulder/phone cradle, a fancy office chair, etc. And every time, our CEO would make Nancy return more than half of what she bought. (Nancy’s direct supervisor was two seconds away from retirement so he let her do whatever she wanted.) The irony is we already had a supplier for mass items that every department needed like office chairs, manila file folders, pens, paper, paperclips, etc. The Staples credit card was for last minute things we didn’t have in the supply closet OR a very specific, unique thing that we couldn’t wait on ordering.

    Yet…no one told Nancy to stop pulling that crap. It was like Groundhog Day EVERY TIME.

  104. Ann O'Nemity*

    Nice pens. Every office I’ve ever worked in stocked cheap ass pens, so nice ones get hoarded. I’ve never understood why employers don’t provide better pens – it seems like a pretty inexpensive way to bring employees joy.

    Batteries. My last employer stopped putting them in the supply closet because every box of batteries would disappear the same day they were restocked. Maybe employees wanted to keep extras in their desk, but I suspect people were taking them home.

  106. irritable vowel*

    I’m so thankful that I no longer work in a library full of people who save Everything because You Never Know. Even their used yogurt cups, because you can use them for distributing swag at events where yes, everyone at the fancy univer$ity will no doubt be impressed by getting a sticker from an old Chobani cup.

  107. Not Your Nacho*

    My office still uses a typewriter. Its huge, monstrous and sadly still used daily (often) to type dates on awards and other important documents. If someone would just buy us printers that we could fit the odd size paper in, I could date things electronically. But that would make sense.

    Instead, I have a stockpile of typewriter ribbons and correction tape in case they can’t be bought again. Yes, I work for a large government agency.

  108. Mergatroid*

    I know this is probably not surprising working in a public school, but we can ONLY take cash. No digital payments, no checks, no credit cards. Young folx don’t have cash like that. They have Cashapp. Parents barely have cash like that. Parents want to pay for more expensive fieldtrips with a check, as is relatively reasonable, but we can only collect that payment in cash, even if it’s several hundred dollars.

    We have lost so much money for our program because people want to come support, but they don’t have the cash. We either have to turn them away or just let them in. When I created my own digital payment method (they would epay me personally and I would get cash later), it showed that we would have lost out on over $500 in one weekend due to not being able to accommodate non-cash payments. My method is outside of the policy and I’m sure they would tell me the stop (heheh, forgiveness/permission), and I understand that dishonest people could abuse this ‘power’, but that $500 really did give us some breathing room and allowed us to pour back into our kids and program.

    1. Gila Monster*

      I work at a government agency, and it only accepts money orders. If you lose your ID, there’s a $20 fee, payable exclusively in money order. The ID office has a big laminated sign with directions to the nearest post office.

  109. MediumEd*

    All this talk makes me glad I work from home most of the time. I hated my college’s arcane supply ordering rules, which changed every few months when our administration wanted to save more money. We are now experiencing a major financial crunch and I am glad I can keep my favorite pens to myself in my home office as I look for new work!

  110. Anon this time*

    I worked in a lab that was moving to a new building and the prevailing attitude in our building was that we should just throw everything away* and buy new after the move. So there were massive boxes in the hallways full of lab supplies and roving gangs of scientists snooping for anything useful they could scavenge. I rescued a new-in-box multimeter, soldering iron, and engraver. No idea why we had any of them in the first place because none of them were the types of things we would routinely use. I did take the opportunity to get rid of a whole bunch of pathology/dissection supplies since the lab had quit doing animal work years before I joined but some of the previous lab employees had been inexplicably hoarding a bunch of expired supplies “just in case.”

    *to be fair for some of the consumables this made sense and supposedly our company hired another group to sort through our discard supplies and send anything useful to schools/non-profits so it was not going to the dump.

  111. Formeradmin*

    I used to be an Executive Assistant in the early 2000s, the lady who ordered the supplies for our department was a hoarder, there was a whole room jam packed with supplies and her cubicle was jam packed with supplies and food. Well she retired and the responsibility fell into me, they eventually told me to clean her desk out and as I was doing so, I found a couple of dead mice hidden under stuff. I was so grossed out. I spent a lot of time in that supply room organizing and purging old supplies, it was satisfying to get it into shape.

    1. Percy Weasley*

      A few years ago, one of our student assistants was purging some old (paper) files and found the dessicated body of a bat!

  112. HannahS*

    O! The dinosaur tech in hospitals.

    Things I had to learn how to use include 20th century tech including a fax machine, a pager, a air-pressure tube transport system (for paperwork; unfortunately not for people,) a medical record system that runs on MS-DOS and 19th century tech in the form of carbon paper order sheets, which are filled in duplicate while sitting next to a computer and photocopier/fax machine/scanner-that-sends-emails. The inefficiency boggles the mind.

  114. MHG*

    It’s been more than a decade since I worked in an office, but I do remember binder clips being valuable. My personally-bought purple binder clips would show up on on the desks of people way above me. Drove me nuts.

  115. Elizabeth*

    I am locked into a (good-natured) battle to the ends of the earth with our IT guy over the fax machine. We switched mainly to VOIP phone lines, but for other reasons, we have to have at least one landline. I know nothing about the tech side of this, only what costs I have to manage through supply chain.

    He keeps trying to tell me that there are redundancies and that network systems are far more stable and reliable than landlines, and every time he does, something happens. Teams crashes or our wifi goes down or we have no power to the building except the generator (which will power the fax but not computers). The last time, I got to spend a half day just walking by him saying “mmhmm”.

    I’m not actually devoted to the fax; I haven’t sent one in at least 20 years. But I enjoy how fate has a go at him each and every time he takes a stand.

  116. Ama*

    Back when I was the office manager for a graduate school, a predecessor in my position had inexplicably bought boxes and boxes of rubber bands (enough to fill two very tall cabinets). I have no idea why they thought we would need rubber bands at all, much less that many. I was at that job for three years and I let one of the grad students take a box when they were moving and wanted some for bundling small items and other than that I don’t think we ever even opened one.

    They also had bought a ridiculous amount of ledger size paper (that’s 11×17), which we only used during budget season and only about 25 pages each year, and multiple cabinets full of giant bottles of hand sanitizer, which I have to imagine got raided once 2020 hit, but they were so big my boss would have me buy the smaller ones during flu season because they were easier to distribute across the office.

    1. Chicago Anon*

      I bet they thought they were ordering one box of rubber bands, and it turned out that the “box” was actually 500 (or whatever) boxes packaged in a carton.

      1. Ama*

        I actually suspect what happened is they just bought the same quantity of everything in the first supply order when our building opened (the grad school was only a few years old when I was hired there and our initial operating budget was covered by a massive donor gift), and didn’t really think about the fact that 200 boxes of rubber bands wasn’t going to get used at the same rate as 200 reams of letter size paper.

      2. ICodeForFood*

        Yes! This happened to a department where I worked in the 1990s, when they thought they were ordering a package of salmon-colored 3″x5″ index cards, and they got a huge case!

  117. Moo*

    Garbage cans.

    Our workplace moved to centralized garbage stations about four or five months ago. This was not a problem, but then they came through one night and took ALL of the individual garbage cans and said we weren’t allowed to have them at our desks anymore. Now you had to get up and walk across the office any time you needed to throw something out. People had a fit. Turned out they left all of the recycling bins though, which were just garbage cans of a different color, so everyone lifted those and put in their own garbage bags. Cleaners were told not to empty individual cans which nobody objected to, but I think in the end they caved, because our regular cleaner still picks up our individual bags, and when she’s out another person does it too.

    1. Distracted Procrastinator*

      This is funny to me because I had a two month passive aggressive silent fight with facilities because I didn’t want a can at my cubicle. I wanted the knee space because I regularly use both sides of my L shaped desk and the can gets in the way. I have a small desktop garbage can (it looks like a little cube shaped robot and I love it.) I don’t need a trash and a recycle bin. Twice a week I would show up in the morning and have the two cans under my desk. I would immediately move them somewhere else in the building. The cycle would repeat itself. I finally won the battle.

      Yes, I could have left a note, but I got something out of the fight and I haven’t been able to define what that was, but satisfaction was part of it.

  118. Felt tip pens*

    Once I almost quit my job over pens. There’s a certain pen I like to use and it costs about $12 for a box that lasts a year (or longer), so I’d put in an order every year or so and it was always fine.

    I had been assigned a truly AWFUL project where I had to be the public face of something VERY unpopular that our department was doing. It was awful. I was being harassed by the public and my work did not step in to do anything. It was supposed to be a one off project, and I liked my job other than that, so I decided to just grit my teeth and bear it. When it finally wrapped up, I put in my yearly pen order, only to have it DENIED because “we’re not spending money on special pens anymore!”

    I was so angry I almost quit on the spot, and only didn’t because I texted a friend who talked me down. $12 pens could have bought a lot of goodwill, and wouldn’t have made a big difference in our budget. I had a new job within a few months.

  119. Sharpie*

    My previous job was in a warehouse, packing product. Thanks to COVID, everyone was issued their own tape gun and box cutter. I wound up with one of the two blue ones and wish I could have smuggled it and my box cutter out when I left. It’s crazy how attached you can get to something you use every day!

  120. Lefty*

    My first office job was very paper driven- the bulk of my job was a) inputting paper data to the computer, and b) printing out computer data for others (including a daily courier who would pick up my printed papers and deliver them to the corporate office… why email or upload when you can have Jeff do it!). Anyhow, the point is I stapled and unstapled many times a day, and I quickly learned not all staple removers are equal. The small pinchy ones were all i’d known, but my predecessor had acquired a bright pink wand style remover, which was a revelation- faster, more comfortable, and kept the removed staples. That was the only thing I took with me during the several branch transfers with that employer, and it’s currently within reach in my pen cup, a good 16yrs after leaving that company. I use it only a few times a year now (if that), but I’ll keep it forever.

  121. 1-800-BrownCow*

    At the manufacturing company I work at, we have machines that are ~30 years old that have the 3.5″ floppy disc drives. We recently had to save all our programs from the machine to a disc, as we had to do a factory reset on the machine and were going to lose all our programs. IT came through and managed to find some blank floppy discs in a box in their storage area. The IT person who helped us out is young enough to say he’d never actually used one before, but did know what one looked like. I was just impressed that we actually had what we needed. I told IT it was one of those rare moments that it paid to not toss old, outdated equipment, lol.

    Also, I work in a very male dominant field and after years of having scissors “disappear” from my desk, I bought myself a pair of scissors with hot pink handles. I’ve now had these scissors for 10 years now and no one has “forgotten” to return them when borrowed.

    1. NMitford*

      I haven’t seen any in stores in years now, but I had one job where I used to always buy boxes of pink Kleenex for my desk at work because a box of white Kleenex would practically evaporate overnight. I also had pink thumb drives for the same reason.

    2. Your Mate in Oz*

      One software place I worked in inevitably needed a basic tool kit for dealing with recalcitrant computers. It turned out that the exact same zip-up folder of tools was half the price in pink rather than black. The folder was pink, most of the tools were pink, it was glorious.

      To this day I still have no idea *why* the pink toolkit was half the price. But I’m amused and grateful (albeit saving $20 when the lowest paid person in the office was on $40/hour is basically irrelevant)

      1. Good Enough For Government Work*

        It’s probably because they were less desirable and sold less well, on account of being pink.

        I recently bought a £70 set of headphones for £20, for what I’m assuming was the same reason – only the baby pink ones were discounted; the black and navy ones were full price.

  122. Elle Woods*

    In the days before digital documentation, there was a lot of bickering over the heavy duty three-hole punch at one place I worked. Colleagues would take the punch to their desk, use it, and either forget to take it back to the common area or get delayed in doing so. One of the admins in the department was so sick of people walking off with it that she bought flexible metal cable and a padlock and locked it a desk in the common area.

  123. Lexorez*

    I used to be in charge of ordering lab supplies, and I’d get big boxes filled with Kleenex dispenser style boxes full of gloves. I was the only woman and the only one who wore medium and one of the big boxes would last me the better part of a year and I would get three or four big boxes of large every 6 months for everyone else. We got a new guy who was really big and requested XL gloves, and from the moment the XL gloves hit the storage cupboard, not a single other man working there would deign to even look at the large gloves. When the XL gloves ran out unexpectedly quickly I had multiple people come to my office asking when we were getting more because they just could not wear large gloves on their XL hands. I eventually had to take my three nearly untouched big boxes of large gloves and donate them to a different department.

  124. Kristyn*

    Scissors. Somehow I only have child scissors (and I don’t work in a school?). I go into the office intermittently and that’s the one supply I can never find!

  125. Broken Lawn Chair*

    The credit card imprinter. You know (if you’re old enough) – you laid the card in its slot, put a 2 part carbon paper receipt on top, and slid the roller piece over it so the raised numbers on the card would be printed onto the receipt.

    We did get rid of it, but only about 5 years ago, and only after some discussion: “But what if the power goes out?” Okay, well, if the power goes out, first, we will close the store and kick everyone out for safety anyway. Second, if the power is out we can’t ring people up anyway – the UPSs on the registers might last long enough to finish current transaction, but that’s all. Third, how would we approve a large purchase? Now it’s electronic, but back in the day sometimes people would call the credit card issuer for approvals. Do you know who and how to call for that? I don’t, and I think if I tried they’d be like “what?” And finally, if we did take someone’s card this way, how would we tell the system they had paid? And how would we send this slip in to the card company to get the money? We don’t have a mechanism to do that.

    You can still buy these things, so the mechanisms must exist somewhere, but we’re definitely not set up for it in my very large retail employer.

    1. callmeheavenly*

      do most cards even have raised numbers anymore? I don’t think I’ve seen that in a while.

      1. Dragonfly7*

        My very first card for most accounts does, such as my new checking and FSA accounts, but any replacements, like the credit card I canceled when I thought I lost my wallet, don’t have them.

    2. Random Bystander*

      I remember those. And I remember in a forum once someone described that and then asked “that can’t be legal, can it?” Someone informed the youngster that that used to be the way it was done. (Of course, these days, it seems all my cards are going to printing the number flat on the card, so it wouldn’t work.)

      I also worked for a time in a small store where we *did* have a power outage and did not close (it was a ladies’ clothing store). We hand-wrote the receipts with all the sku numbers and prices, had a little “cheat card” to tell the correct amount of sales tax for the totals, and a solar-powered calculator. And yes, we did use the old credit card imprinter, called MC or Visa for an approval #. I was also the only associate who didn’t have to use the calculator to figure out change for the cash customers, because I still remembered the “count back” method. (For those who don’t remember, let’s say that the customer’s total was $23.62 and they handed over two twenties–so you put penny one in their hand “twenty-three sixty-three,” next penny “twenty-three sixty-four”, next penny “twenty-three sixty-five” a dime “twenty-three seventy-five” a quarter “twenty-four dollars”, a dollar bill “twenty-five” a five “thirty” and a ten “and that makes forty dollars”. Co-worker looked at me like I was doing alchemy, then she’d punch the numbers into the calculator and realize that I had given the correct change in less time than it took her to punch the numbers into the calculator.)

  126. Tio*

    Wet erase markers for whiteboards. We’re not even teachers or anything that uses whiteboards often; but because of that, people steal them, and no one orders them because we don’t use them enough, so there are never any to go around… so people who do use them start taking them, sequestering them in their offices and whatnot, and the cycle continues. These whiteboards only really exist in the conference rooms and are rarely used.

  127. HEL*

    The most coveted and hoarded items in my office were metal cranks that could be inserted over a nut in our desks to raise or lower the desks. There seemed to about one for every 20 desks, so it paid to keep track of who had one and what they appreciated for bribes. I inherited mine from a coworker who left and relished my position of power and generosity.
    Now we’ve mostly moved to open space and we have electric standing desks on rollers, and my crank handle is just a marker of my tenure and age.

  128. Girasol*

    Coat hooks: those little plastic squiggles that fit neatly over the top of a cubicle wall. Once I was scavenging the office supply drawer where people dumped half-used pads of paper, old pens, and unwanted office items that might still be useful, and came across a bunch of coat hooks. Just the thing to hang my headset and keep it from getting knocked off the desk, I thought. Soon after the VP’s admin sent around a memo saying that “Everyone may have ONE coat hook! You people who are hoarding coat hooks, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!! Put them back!!” I’m pretty sure I was the unintentional culprit. I sheepishly returned my extra hook to the heap in the junk drawer.

  129. Ipsissima*

    The High Chair (not highchair. My coworkers frequently act like children but i do not work with literal infants). We got a new workstation that is about 2″ higher than the old one. People immediately lost their shit and demanded a new chair to go with it. Several employees refused to use the workstation until a new chair was available. The new chair was duly ordered. It is about 4″ taller than a standard office chair (which we had been using) and only fits at the workstation if it (the chair) is lowered as far as possible. Our standard chairs adjust up to 4″ taller. I, the shortest person by far, have no problem using the workstation with a standard chair on its lowest setting. Weirdly, everyone clamoring for the High Chair is now complaining of backache.

    The High Chair still has its devoted followers, but most of us will shove it in a corner and use a standard chair. Sometimes a department that shares our space will borrow the High Chair, and they always give it back before day shift (the High Chair devotees) arrive. They forgot ONCE, but instead of just … walking ten extra steps to grab the Chair (which, by that point, no one was using), day shift decided the appropriate response would be to scream at the day shift of the other department (who had themselves just arrived and were understandably clueless about the Chair), calling them thieves and liars. There are now signs (yes, that’s signs, plural) taped to the Chair. There have been memos about the Chair. There have been entire meetings about the Chair. One time, for a prank, some interns took the Chair and put it on another floor of our building. There was an immediate uproar. Departmental directors were in a frenzy, trying to determine who took the Chair and which department was lying about taking the Chair. (They did not bother to actually look for the Chair, which was in a conference room we used at least once a month. Nor did they ask second or third shift about the Chair.) The interns brought it back after a week, but still, several months later, The Mystery of the Stolen Chair: It Was Probably Those Bastards From Special Testing is still hotly debated.

    (I am swearing all of you to secrecy about this. I like our interns, and if it comes out that they were the Chair thieves, the High Chair Cult will try to ruin their careers.)

  130. theletter*

    Not really an office supply, but I’ve noticed what seems to be an office-supply oriented shift when it comes to florescent overhead lights.

    Most people who take notes on note apps want the lights turned off. Most people who take notes on paper want the lights turned on.

    Pre-pandemic, when everyone sat in sections with their teams, some team divides became a little more apparent when certain corners of the office went dark.

  131. CupcakeCounter*

    My old employer only bought really cheap, crappy pens. One of our employees retired and started a part time business in a specialty he had. It wasn’t common and the company needed it periodically so we hired him 2X a year for these special projects. His first on-site visit he brought these pens. They were awesome! 2 dozen were gone in seconds and people started locking their desk drawers for the first time ever. Each time he came in he brought more and more pens – honestly he probably brought in at least 500 pens over 2 years and there were only about half a dozen of us so the hoarding was real. He was onsite for a project my last day and gave me a dozen pens as a going away gift. Its been 5 years and I still hoard those pens (don’t even share with my husband).

  132. ReallyBadPerson*

    I inherited an office (church job) with a huge, CRT TV that had been donated by a parishioner in the 1970s. No one dared to get rid of it. I asked my predecessor why she she had kept it hulking in there for her entire tenure, and she said that the older ladies got upset when she proposed it. One day, I was cleaning other clutter out of my office when the pastor walked in, said, “Need help dumping that?” and pointed to the TV. We picked it up and just dropped it in the outside waste bin.

  133. Finn*

    The mess in the storage room. A huge stack of cardboard boxes, computer screens, books, and I don’t know what else…
    Not so much sacred as the boss not wanting to tidy it himself and he can’t delegate it to any of my teammates or me.
    Though, he refuses to throw out the old signs that we legally can’t use anymore.
    The stuff that people use gets stored in their offices etc.

  134. Seashell*

    Now I really want an update on the “My ex-boss threatened to contact my husband, his coworkers, and my father-in-law if I don’t return $48 of office supplies” letter.

  135. Cookies For Breakfast*

    At an old job, we moved from an office where supplies were in plain sight and ready to use at any time, to one where nobody knew where they were stored or whether we still kept any. It was one of those fancy design concept offices where employees are not allowed to leave a single personal item on a desk, so I think the reason for hiding supplies was avoiding whatever my then employer considered as “mess” (aka proof there were humans there doing jobs).

    Eventually, I found out there was a limited range of actually useful supplies in the office manager’s desk drawer (scissors, post-its, pens, markers). Every single time I needed something, I’d have to go ask the office manager if I could please borrow it, and in return, received looks that suggested I was the recipient of an extraordinary act of generosity I was not worthy of. That is how I convinced myself that the office manager disliked me for some reason.

  136. librarianmom*

    When I first started my job (35 years ago!!!) I used pencils for a very common function. Unfortunately I would sometimes walk around with a pencil in hand and lose it. The woman in charge of the supplies got quite annoyed with me, handed me two pencils, and told me to make sure I kept track of them since they were the last ones I were getting for a while. Pencils! I lucked out when she retired shortly after that.

    1. librarianmom*

      In a related vein, I was gifted an electric pencil sharpener by a former volunteer. (Ok I used pencils a lot at one time during my long tenure — but not so much anymore.) I hated the sharpener the the whole office used, and I needed to sharpen often (Ok I was a little obsessed with having a sharp pencil point!) She listened to my rantings enough to quite generously gift me one that she had at home and wasn’t using. I loved having it right on my desk and plan to take it with me when I retire this summer.

    2. Once too Often*

      One day I couldn’t find any of my pencils. A colleague came in & I mentioned looking for them. She pointed out that I had 3 tucked in the bun in my hair!

  137. DumpsterFireDaily*

    At a previous job, the office manager would print out Every. Single. Paper. having to do with contracts or clients, despite the fact that everything was securely stored electronically. She had been the Office Manager for close to 30 years. She would make sure everything was saved to the online database, but would STILL print everything to a physical file and store it in a room that had 50 filing cabinets in it. She insisted on doing this because that ONE TIME in 2008 where the server crashed and she had to redo about half a day’s worth of work. The strange thing about all of this was that NO ONE and I mean NO ONE could touch her files. I opened a drawer up one day because I was genuinely curious and confused about why someone would insist on doing this. She about slapped my hand off and slammed the drawer shut, mustering all of her 5’2 frame to death glare up at me. She then scolded me about how these files were confidential, despite the fact that I could access all of them on the database.

  138. chinnybob*

    The building I work in has racks in the garage where I leave my bike. There was some construction work going on and for a while the security staff at the entrance would insist on wrestling you into a hi-vis vest before letting you in. Needless to say I started collecting them out of protest and there’s now about 30 on the back of my chair.. Everyone thinks I’m a fire marshall and the building had to buy more vests.

  139. sequitur*

    There’s a stapler in my office mail room that has a little tag on the front saying “Name:”, presumably from the era when people had their own personal staplers and didn’t want them to get stolen.

    Some comedian has written “Mr Stapler” on the nametag, and it always brings me joy to see Mr Stapler in the mail room.

    1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      When I confiscated a co-worker’s charger with the exposed wires (wearing my Safety hat) I christened it the Right Reverend Dr. Zappy (using a Sharpie) before putting it in the e-waste bin.

  140. Pauli*

    I was a young intern for a respected elderly curator. Management had confiscated her slide projectors, which I believe she considered a direct attack and an attempt to force her into retirement before she was ready to leave her comfy corner office. I spent a lot of time making her power point presentations so they looked as much like slide presentations as possible (and burning them onto CD-RWs!)

  141. Not Australian*

    This is timely, because I’m looking at a tin full of treasury tags and wondering whether I’ll ever need them again…

  142. Loves Libraries*

    I worked in a school library for middle and high school students in2013-2017. I found an amazing collection of film strips. Some were so fancy that they had the cassette tape that narrated the film strips. I tossed them so fast because I was afraid that if I asked I would be told no. And guess what, no one ever wondered where they were.

  143. Nicole T*

    My current editing gig is completely digital, but I still keep a copy of our old style guide (new version is digital) and a print Merriam-Webster dictionary at my desk. I never use them, but it feels weird not to have them!

  144. GiantPanda*

    When my Mom retired she took stacks of obsolete continuous paper and unused punch cards from the 1970s with her. She won’t be able to use it up in her lifetime and has given some to me.

    I have taken it as note paper to my office, and it got envious nostalgic looks from older coworkers (ancient looking! yellowed! holes on the side! endless! – haven’t seen that in decades!) but I am not giving any away…

    1. Donkey Hotey*

      Side note: Mary-Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series is an alt -history spin on the space race starting early with a Hidden Figures element. For a promo for the last book in the series, she included punch cards as part of a pre-order bonus.

    2. pally*

      Yeah, I have some tablets (the paper kind!) my dad brought home from his work at Lockheed in the 1980’s. They are nice too.

      Anyhow, back in the 1960’s, my dad was an electrical engineer with Westinghouse. One of the perks they offered allowed the employees to purchase light bulbs at a cut-rate price. So he took advantage.

      Fast forward to 2024, Dad’s passed on. Mom is still using those light bulbs. Whenever one blows out, she goes into her closet and gets another Westinghouse-purchased light bulb. Yes folks, my dad had purchased a lifetime+ supply of light bulbs. And there’s plenty still left in her closet.

      I suspect I’ll be using these lightbulbs too-once she passes on. Don’t want to waste them!

      1. Non-profit drone*

        I pay large amounts of money for actual incandescent lightbulbs, not the awful LED ones. I literally can’t see to read with the LED ones. The frequency or whatever you call it gives me horrible headaches. I have a couple of online sources that sell incandescents still. If you really want to get rid of the Westinghouse ones, I’ll buy them from you.

    3. Tammy 2*

      I used to work at a job where we would occasionally need to scan inventory reports from car dealerships that were printed on a dot-matrix printer. I looooooove ripping the perforated strips off the sides. So satisfying.

  145. Miss Chanandler Bong*

    At a former company, we moved buildings and had to do a massive clean out. I was in IT at the time, and the former manager was a hoarder. This was 2018. We found Microsoft Office on floppy disk from 1994, unopened. We also found about a million AOL installation CDs, in addition to a bunch of floppy disks.

  146. tan audel*

    they weren’t sacred so much as it felt like a natural cycle: every month (before we went paperless, more recently than you’d think), we’d use paperclips at an astonishing rate for about two weeks. by the end of that time we’d often be running out, trying to scrounge them from the desks of people who didn’t use them so much. but most of the time it didn’t make sense to just order more because as soon as the next stage of the process got done, they’d all trickle back and we’d have an ocean of paperclips again. repeat monthly.

  147. Aspiring Chicken Lady*

    The random coat tree (from a crappy store, definitely not an Official Purchase) that is in the supply room with a note on it pointing out that is broken (it’s missing a leg), but somehow does not get simply tossed.

  148. The Farmer's Daughter*

    Teacher here! When I moved schools, back to my hometown, I asked the secretary if I could please have a tape dispenser but she told me in no uncertain terms that she had ordered 3 new ones and they had already been taken so I was out of luck until next year. Fast forward a month or two and I was in the city and near a big box office supply store and feeling flush with cash and ready to splurge on what must obviously be a big ticket item. It was $3.99. Seriously?!?!

  149. Scavenging Crow*

    As a young HR assistant, I ordered supplies for the office, including new hires. It was much easier to get nice new equipment when you were first hired than after you’d been there a while, so longtime workers often had organizational systems that were pieced together, supplies showing wear and tear, etc.

    When someone new didn’t work out long-term, I’d raid their vacated desk and switch out the supplies, giving myself and others the “good” stuff. It was a great run until one of the bigger bosses realized what was going on and sent an email calling us all scavenging crows. They shut down my “redistribution program,” but never actually traced it to me.

    Also, crows are resourceful, intelligent creatures and I still appreciate the comparison!

    1. Cat*

      Not sure if intentional or not, but the phrasing of this implies that new hires are classed as office supplies…

  150. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

    Spouse used to work at a campus library where The Stapler was the most sacred of office supplies and also, the most fought-over symbol of power. The Stapler lived on the reference desk. It was never to leave the reference desk lest chaos befall all who sought serenity in the library. However, the reference desk was the worst place for The Stapler.

    The only people who used it were students who had just finished printing in the computer lab. If they wanted to staple their printed documents, they had to trek from the computer lab in one corner of the ground floor all the way to the opposite corner which, according to independent student surveys done in the comments box, was the longest point-A-to-point-B in the whole library.

    The morning shift reference desk librarian was sick of the lines forming at the desk just to use The Stapler, so they started moving it over to the computer lab printer where it would be the most useful. The later shift librarian was outraged. The Stapler should never be moved from this exact spot on the reference desk! It must be visible to the reference librarians at all times because if it were to be out of sight, some ne’er-do-well surely will abscond with it! So The Stapler was moved back to the reference desk, only to be moved to the computer lab the following morning by the morning shift librarian.

    This went on for weeks until the later shift librarian convinced facilities to attach a chain to The Stapler that kept it permanently attached to the reference desk. The morning shift librarian was not amused (nor were students who had to try and awkwardly staple while attached to a chain). A week later, the chain was mysteriously cut in two and The Stapler returned to the computer lab.

    The later shift librarian finally had enough and moved The Stapler to underneath the reference desk so students would have to ask for it, which only exacerbated the problem. The morning shift librarian complained to the library director, meetings were held, powerpoints made, political factions formed, nothing got resolved.

    Finally, someone had enough and brought in a second stapler for the computer lab. It immediately disappeared. The later shift librarian was adamant this amounted to proof of the righteousness of their position. The morning shift librarian wasn’t fooled and found the second stapler hidden in a drawer in the later shift librarian’s workstation.

    When spouse left that job, the war over The Stapler was still raging and we have no idea if it ever got resolved. I kind of hope it’s still ongoing, hearing about the latest stapler-related antics was often the highlight of my day.

  151. Art of the Spiel*

    Back in the dark ages, I worked in insurance for a company that refused to use those new-fangled post-it notes. We had to staple or paperclip.

    My stapler had a broken spring, so my staples were all bent. Admin *refused* to purchase a new one. I started saving the 3-4 bent up misfired staples for every successful one. Once I had a nice pile, I put them in a baggie and asked her: “If I can save enough of these to sell them to a scrap dealer for enough money to purchase a new stapler, will you consider it?”

    Got the heck out of there before I had the $$ saved up…

  152. Office Autist*

    I am the guilty part here, although for good reason. Seasonally (and unfortunately) another department has to take over our office at night time. When I come back in the morning, supplies on my desk have been used or are missing (even though there is explicit instruction for the night people to bring/use their own supplies). When my favorite lined 4×4 post its and good pen had gone missing yet again, I figured out a solution. I put my coveted supplies in my drawer and leave them some crappy post its and basic garbage pen out on the desk as decoys! Now when I find those moved or missing, I don’t care.

  153. PopPunkLibrarian*

    I work in an academic library, and our office supplies often like to walk away with the students (or faculty or community members) that borrow them. Pencils, paper clips, and little things aren’t much of an issue, but it eats up the budget to buy dozens of staplers, tape dispensers, pairs of scissors, etc. every year. So we put tattle tape on them! (For the non-librarians, tattle tape is the electromagnetic strip in library books that sets off the door sensors when entering and exiting the library.) That way we can at least try to reduce the wandering tendencies of our office supplies by knowing when they’re headed out the door.

  154. RunShaker*

    When I first started with my current company in July 2022. White Out Correction tape….It was handed to me as some sort of scared item. My coworker (very much younger) was very serious, the look she had on her face and her voice, “this is something I found I use often and you need to keep it at your desk.” I think the look on my face said it all since my coworker insisted I take it. There are times I have hard time controlling the looks on my face and I know I had the what look! Ladies and gentleman, I haven’t used white out in 20 years! I was also surprised since I’m 50 and I figured white out was a bygone relic and there wouldn’t be a need for white out in most offices, at least computer heavy offices. I still have it and haven’t used it yet.

  155. Goose*

    When we cleaned out my grandmother’s house, we found 25 pairs of scissors, all labeled “property of [place she worked for years]”. So they clearly knew there was a scissor thief, but never caught her.

    1. pally*

      Guess that answers the question as to whether putting the company name on scissors will deter theft of same. Nope. Not one bit.

      (that was suggested as a remedy for our massive number of scissors disappearing)

  156. Rubber baby buggy bumpers*

    A rubberband ball that was bequeathed from the outgoing admin to the incoming admin. At most, you used the outer layer and then replaced them with the rubberbands that came wrapped around the daily mail. The inner layers were probably at least 15 years old when it was given to me, and that was 25 years ago. Last time I visited that the department, it was still sitting there, on the current admin’s desk.

  157. I'm an NP now*

    When I worked as a floor nurse at a hospital, our unit clerk kept all writing utensils locked in the supply closet and you needed to find him in a really good mood to get him to unlock it if you needed a pen. We were in and out of rooms all day and we all needed pens, all the time. Another clerk said once that “he guards them like he buys them”. When a colleague left she gave the nurses a bouquet of pens and it was the most thoughtful thing!

  158. Raine*

    My office once had a massive tape shortage. We receive broken laptops daily and would tape a printout of the repair ticket to each laptop so that we could easily match laptop to ticket. But when we ran out of tape, we couldn’t do that and instead just put the printouts on top of the laptop or wrote the ticket number on a sticky note. Those inevitably fell off and it took ages to figure out what troubleshooting has already been done with Laptop A, why Laptop B is even here, where Laptop C is when its owner came to pick it up, etc. It was chaos!

    My colleagues and our supervisors all blamed our director, who had access to the budget and clearly did not care about us enough to order the basic office supplies needed to do our jobs. Resentment festered. Eventually, an associate director position was created to help bridge this disconnect. The AD met with us as a team and asked how he could help us. He was surprised that the #1 request was tape. Just regular old tape, but everyone was yelling and freaking out about how critical this was. So he got tape. About half the department was happy and went on our merry way, just doing our jobs. The other half was still resentful, convinced that the AD was a “pawn” of the director who had only given us tape to buy our goodwill before eventually “showing his true colors.”

    A few months into this new regime, one of the supervisors was let go for an unrelated issue. When the AD went to clean out her office, he discovered a whole drawer full of tape. She had been hoarding it for months, while being the loudest voice complaining about the tape shortage and watching our workflow crumble into chaos. We suspect that neither of the supervisors ever actually told the director that we were low on tape in the first place (because we clearly weren’t!), so he probably never even knew he was allegedly ignoring our basic office supply needs.

    Eight years later, the AD still twitches whenever someone tells him we’re running low on tape!

  159. pally*

    Scissors! Nothing fancy or specialized. Talking the run of the mill office scissors.

    Around here they disappear at an alarming rate. And they don’t turn up later on.

    For a company of less than 20 people, we have purchased well over a hundred pairs of scissors as they go missing All. The. Time.

    Where do they go? Nobody can figure this out.

    I suspect that one day, someone will open a random drawer and all 100+ pairs of scissors will be inside. Til then, we keep purchasing replacements.

  160. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

    In the beginning of my teaching career, I taught typing on manual typewriters, then transitioned to IBM Selectrics. When I left, I had boxes and boxes of correction tape and ribbons.

    I also taught keypunching and kept boxes of keypunch cards.

    I took them from school to school when I was transferred and some poor sucker it probably still wondering what to do with this stuff.

  161. PowerPoint Princess*

    I’m going to self-report: I became obsessed with a slide advance clicker I found in an abandoned drawer. I was the go-to person for PowerPoints and presentations so it seemed only right that I should be the keeper of the remote. One time, I was in charge of organizing a meeting with back-to-back presentations. I saw myself as very gracious to let the presenters take turns borrowing “my” remote. It was practical, too: They knew their content best and could advance their slides on their own. Plus, it meant I wouldn’t be “just the slide girl,” with them saying “next slide, next slide” and me pressing the arrow key from the computer. Well, halfway through the meeting, the remote went missing. I was devasted and must have looked ridiculous looking under my laptop, under my chair, rifling through binders, etc. I proclaimed a few times: “Guess I’m just the slide girl!” and glumly spent the rest of the day advancing slides for the speakers.

    The next day, I found the remote wedged in my binder and was so relieved. When we were later asked to clean out our desks since the office was downsizing (we are now permanently remote), it was one of the things I brought home with me as a “necessity.”

  162. Fork guy*

    Forks.

    I am a CPA, I started my career in a big 4 accounting firm, then was employed as a controller for a mid-size company, then became a consultant.

    So between my own places of employment and my clients, I have worked in dozens of different office settings.

    The one thing that A LOT of places had in common, was forks.
    Forks tend to disappear from the kitchen. Which leads to people hoarding them at their desks. Which leads to even more forks missing.

    I have seen people arguing over the last remaining fork.

    One place had a sign-out sheet for forks.

    One place had a locked utensils drawer that needed a key from an admin to open.

    Others had drawers overflowing with spoons and knives because procurement would buy complete utensils sets to replace missing forks and not get rid of the spoons and knives from old sets. Many times over.

    I was asked to write procedures specifically addressing kitchenware management.

    I learned quickly to bring my own fork and keep it in my lunchbox.

    2. Csethiro Ceredin*

      It’s teaspoons here.

      Back in the day I when such matters were my problem I posted various reminder signs from simple post-its to to drawings of a spoon with wings to haiku and rewordings of The Cat and the Fiddle urging people to return their teaspoons.

      Knives, on the other hand, seem to breed. Maybe a teaspoon is the larval stage of the adult dinner knife?

    3. Project maniac-ger*

      The forks! So many forks!!

      What I don’t understand is in my own home I run out of spoons before I run out of forks.

  163. Homeburger*

    Sharpie S-Gels in ultrafine point are the newest currency at our place. They don’t go in the supply cabinet, the office manager hands them out secretly. I’m sure they are way too extravagant for our budget. I think – I hope – I’m on her list for next quarters’ supply order.

  164. CaptainMeg*

    I’m a teacher so expo markers and sticky notes are our sacred items. I sometimes get pulled from my inclusion classes to cover teachers who are out and 90% of the time I have to bring my own expo markers and sticky notes with me because the teacher I am covering has theirs hidden or locked away.

  165. Shellfish Constable*

    KEYS. omg so many keys.

    When she started last year, our new office manager discovered a whole BOX of keys — door keys, cabinet keys, drawer keys, luggage keys, bike lock keys — stored, ironically, in an unlocked drawer in our front office (this is an academic department at an American university, btw). Some of the keys had unintelligible cardboard tags marked with a hieroglyphic system that hasn’t been used around here since the Carter administration, but most of them were just tossed in the box willy-nilly, unlabeled and unused. She did her due diligence and tried to match keys to locks, and spent about two weeks carefully testing keys on doors and drawers before coming to the reasonable conclusion that roughly 97% of this critical mass of keys were effectively scrap metal. Pretty much all the offices have been updated in the last decade — storage areas remodeled, doors locks changed to electronic key cards, old desks replaced — so the odds were excellent that the locks that fit these keys are rotting in a dump somewhere. She decided to toss the key collection, and sent around a brief but polite email on a Monday notifying our department that the keys were going in the garbage on Friday.

    And then the great chorus of “BUT WHAT IF…?!” rose up: “But what if I need to lock student exams up in a cabinet?!” [note: virtually all student exams are now given and stored online]; “But what if I get locked out of my office?!” [again: key cards = no keys]; “But what if I need to store something securely in my desk?!” [we’re in offices in a hallway on a floor in a building where at pretty much every entrance — including our offices — you have to swipe your key card]; and, everyone’s favorite, “But what if one of those keys is to something important?!” [then why was it tossed in a cardboard box with about 700 other keys 22 years ago?].

    Needless to say, the 7lb box of keys is still here, but now it is locked [!!] in our office manager’s file cabinet. “Just in case.”

    1. tupperware of keys*

      Same! I was promoted last year and inherited a large tupperware full of keys that have no known locks. There are some regular metal ones, little metal ones with plastic handles that were probably from a filing cabinet or something, some have little keychains on them, it’s a mess. I’ve been able to identify a few, but most of them have no match and have to be obsolete. The owner absolutely refuses to let me get rid of them, “just in case” we ever encounter a lock to which we have no key. I’ve tried every lock here, and I’m not sure where they think this mythical lock seeking a key is going to appear from, but I guess my tupperware of keys and I will be ready when (if) it ever happens.

    2. Tierrainney*

      Oh man! I want those keys.

      a few years ago I wanted to do a craft project with keys. I remember in childhood it seemed like everyone had lots of keys in drawers and it shouldn’t be hard for me to find a bunch of unused keys.

      I was wrong. No one would admit to having any unused keys. and trying to buy some was expensive.

  166. RedinSC*

    HDMI and USBC cables.

    We cannot keep them in place, AND people take them from the conference rooms so that when we go in to plug in and present on the overhead the cables are gone.

    I don’t know if people are just losing cables right and left and instead of asking for a replacement just take the conference room ones or what, but it’s CRAZY!

  167. Donkey Hotey*

    I started my previous job in 2017. During the indoc/tour, we passed through the copy/office supplies room. I don’t know which made me more sad: the half empty box of 3.5″ floppies or the sealed box behind it. It felt like longing.

    Fast forward to 2021 and during a “let’s clean everything” surge, I found Telex tapes. “But we need those!” And what will you read them with? (pause) “But we need those!”

  168. ZK*

    Not an office, but I ran the print center in my local big box office supply store for years. Pens were my hoard. Companies would give us samples every month, and since I checked in UPS, I got them first. I would also store use (with manager approval) other pens, just to try them. I went so far as to take a label maker and label them with my name. I also had a slight Office Space Milton obsession with a neon green stapler that was also labeled with my name. Everyone knew not to touch my pens and was very good about bringing them to me if I left one laying around. When I quit, I took every last one of my pens with me, but sadly, forgot my stapler. I still have a pen obsession, but only with one brand now. (I like a VERY fine tip gel pen, so one brand is perfect).

  169. Tradd*

    My office buys the cheapest possible. I much prefer Pilot G-7 gel pens in blue, so I buy my own and use refills I get online, which makes the cost much less. But people try and swipe my pens since they like the type better. I keep ONE pen in the office and a pack of refills. I hide a spare pen in my purse. I use larger post it notes for daily lists. Again, I bring in my own as office only supplies the small ones. A coworker keeps using them when turning files over to me when he’s gone. I’ll have them at hand for making notes on files, but he will grab them in front of me. He doesn’t need the larger ones for his very short notes on the front of a file. I finally told him he can get his own as I supply them for my use. He got the hint.

  170. another fed*

    When my independent federal agency was sent home for COVID, those of us making any kind of paper notes had to adjust to taking electronic notes. We made phone calls to our population and that was when many of us missed being able to jot key words down as our CRM system is wonky at best. We were sent desktop white board tablets that work with dry erase markers. I use it all the time, even just to make to do lists for myself. So helpful for small tasks that in the olden days I used to have a stack of scrap paper for.

  171. CherryBlossom*

    I used to work for a fashion designer who refused to get rid of her credit card carbon copier. It was one of those old-timey giant things where you’d swipe people’s credit cards under copy paper to make multiple copies. As you can imagine, people got super uncomfortable when we finished transaction and then took their cards to straight-up make copies. We lost more than a few sales over it, and she never needed the copies for anything, but she refused to stop using it.

    This designer was super high-fashion, headlining multiple fashion weeks and regularly rubbing shoulders with A-Listers. But she just could not get with the times, tech-wise.

  172. Nesprin*

    Somehow paper towels are one of the most contentious lab supplies. I work in a lab where handwashing is required every time we leave the lab- so like 4-10 times in a typical day.

    We can’t buy them because our grants can’t pay for paper towels- paper towels should be in “overhead”. The accounting manager won’t give us access to our overhead fees- they go to the building supply manager. The building supply person can use overheads to order paper towels, but she can’t go in our lab and refuses to give access to her paper towel stock. Our custodians can order paper towels, but they’re only supposed to stock kitchens and bathrooms.

    So for the past 5 years, I’ve been stealing paper towels from the bathroom when no one is looking.

    1. Mockingjay*

      I used to work in government offices in a cube farm. Buildings were always dilapidated and dusty, so I kept a roll of paper towels and a bottle of cleaner from the dollar store in the cabinet over my cube desk.

      Imagine my surprise when a coworker on the other side of the cube wall nonchalantly strolled into my cube, opened the cabinet and took the cleaning supplies out, walked back to his cube, cleaned his desk, and then brought everything back. Without saying a word.

      I was completely befuddled and said nothing myself.

      1. Random Dice*

        I’m imagining you nonchalantly walking over, unplugging his monitor, and strolling off.

        ^ things I think of long afterwards

  173. I'm A Little Teapot*

    At a previous job, when I interviewed I was informed that they were preparing to move the office. The new location was better for me so I was fine with it. Old office had been the office for decades. In preparation for the move, the company had had multiple dates of clean out. My department had filing cabinets lining all the walls, an entire room of filing cabinets, and I was told that prior to this dedicated clean out they were all full. I can’t imagine the amount of paper that was discarded from the office as a whole.

    However, in the final packing up for the move, I guess that there hadn’t been much clean out of office supplies. They arranged to donate unneeded office supplies to the very large public school district. I heard that a small truck (think uhaul size) of office supplies was donated. There was also a fair amount thrown out because it was so old, damaged, etc. The rest got packed into crates. Each department had its own supply closet, so lots of crates.

    When we got into the new office, all the containers of office supplies that were kept were initially centralized, with the intent that the admin staff would be organizing/sorting, then later distributing supplies to the various supply closets scattered through the office. Readers, the office supplies that were kept were enough to fill a uhaul. There were crates of office supplies stacked 3 high, filling the room and lining the adjoining corridor. Multiple admins spent 2 weeks sorting, storing, distributing, and then finally another large load went to the school district. Even then, you had to be careful opening drawers because they were so full. It was exceptionally difficult to get approval to purchase office supplies of any sort, and for some reason the CEO got involved and enforced that on management. Use what was already there.

  174. PricklyPearOverThere*

    The good walkie/radio. I think this is a universal experience for any place that uses radios/walkie talkies to communicate. In three separate jobs, I’ve seen people nearly come to blows because someone took a certain radio from the communal bank of radios, and another person took offense because it’s “theirs”. It was always a race at the beginning of the day to grab the best ones, and if you came in on a later shift, you were at the mercy of the communication gods.

    I worked at a location where radios are assigned to each department and would show up with that department’s name on the screen. I would find that my small department would gradually lose all of its radios, and have to go collect them from other locations so we could function. You’d also have people come to our floor, confused because someone had radioed from “our department” when reality one of our radios had made its way to another floor entirely.

    To be fair, when some of these radios went bad, they were practically useless. Then again, it would be completely absurd to buy enough functional radios for your whole staff, right?

    1. ZK*

      Handheld computers and radios. Years ago when I worked at Sam’s, the night shift would lock the good ones in their lockers. This eventually led to HR and the GM going through every locker to pull them out and locking them in a cabinet that you had to get a manager to unlock at the start of your shift, then you had to sign them out. But no one ever really kept track until they had to go locker diving again periodically.

  175. Catabouda*

    I want all the pen nerds to know I get it, I am one of you, and people who don’t understand how important a good pen is should be avoided. We don’t need that kind of negativity in our lives.

    1. nozenfordaddy*

      My company buys terrible pens, so I buy my own. People are always and forever wondering why I get better pens and I’m like… cause I purchase them myself.

      Life is too short to waste it on a bad pen.

    2. librarianmom*

      This reminds me of dialogue in West Wing:
      BARTLET
      Are we out of pens?

      Charlie pulls a pen out of the penholder on Bartlet’s table and hands it
      to him.

      BARTLET
      That’s a good pen, I need an everyday pen.

      CHARLIE
      I’ve got pens. [starts off to his desk]

      BARTLET
      You’ve got crappy pens, with a plastic top. I need a solid pen that feels
      good in my
      hand, but it’s not so formal I feel like a dandy.

      CHARLIE
      I’m making some trips to the pen store, aren’t I, Mr. President?

      BARTLET
      I used to have the perfect pens. Every day right here, in my pocket. I loved
      those pens!
      Balance, great action, paper soaked up the ink what the hell happened to
      those pens? Do
      they not make them anymore? I kept that company in business.
      —–
      Charlie reveals later that it was the late Mrs. Landingham who always put the pen in his pocket.
      That show could make you cry with the smallest detail.

  176. suppliertothefrogs*

    When I was an office manager there was a standard list to supply “new hire” desks. All the stuff, stapler, pens, file folders, post it (starter pack), tape dispenser(!), pencil cups, the whole deal. When we were closing the office after an acquisition the number of supplies stuffed in desks was crazy. If I could post a picture, I’d share a trashcan FULL of clear pushpins. Neatly labeled “Pushpins”.

    1. Dragonfly7*

      This made me smile. The “starter pack” for my new workplace is one company branded pen, one steno notebook, one 2-pocket folder that all your new hire paperwork comes in, one mouse pad, one stress ball, and an insulated coffee cup because they are supposedly phasing out the disposable ones. I actually don’t know where to get more pens.
      My desk drawers were full of spare headsets and keyboards.

  177. Georgina*

    My old company director only liked a very specific kind of side-open wallet folder that was discontinued five or so years before I started. He refused to sign paperwork put on his desk in any other style of folder, so each department’s limited remaining supply was sacrosanct. The happiest I ever saw him is the day I cleared out our archival paperwork and saved an extra thirty that had been maligned in storage.

  178. AnotherSarah*

    Many things about a former job drove me nuts, but one of the most exemplary was that there was a budget line for a particular soda…and it was only for the ED. Pity the poor soul who didn’t know it wasn’t for everyone (despite being stored in the communal fridge, with other communal things like creamer). (Okay, not an office supply, but controlled/budgeted for like one.)

  179. LuckyClover*

    Sparkly paper.
    When I was a student assistant for a non-profit youth org, we would be tasked with printing various certificates. One of the more “prestigious” awards they gave was called the “diamond __” It came with a pin with a small (nondiamond) crystal, and the certificate was printed on a nice cardstock with a sparkly sheen on it. They even had us glue a tiny crystal to the paper.
    However, we were always terrified to do them because our supervisor would emphasize that this paper was EXPENSIVE. So we would practice print half a dozen times and check each others work before we were brave enough to load the special paper into the printer.

    I was curious and looked it up, and it looks like a 50 pack of pearlized silver foil certificates is $65…

  180. LaserGuy*

    It’s not quite an office supply, but in the optical physics/chemistry labs where I’ve worked, it’s ball drivers that are the problem. Every table has a set of ball drivers sitting on it, and every set is always missing the 3/16″ and 5/64″ drivers, because those are far and away the most commonly used. Usually, they have congregated in a huge pile next to someone else’s primary working position where they were set down and forgotten.

    Two jobs in a row, I bought myself a full set and left it in a locked drawer of my desk, only bringing them out when I worked and carefully returning them to their home when I left the lab; it was the only solution I found that worked reliably.

  181. Hilary*

    There’s a director at my company who is obsessed with dried apricots. As a typical tech company, we get snacks and catered lunches, and this guy will go around to every kitchenette in the building (10 total) and grab all the dried apricot snack packs from each of them before anyone else can get them. He’s eating them in every meeting, in the hallway, at lunch, all the time. I can only imagine what it does to his digestive system.

    1. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

      Oh my word. Once in college a dorm-mate’s father sent us this giant Harry & David thing of maybe 25 pounds of dried fruit. And we thought it would be a great idea to “save money” by eating the fruit instead of going to the cafeteria.
      It took out the entire dorm.

  182. KnitterWho*

    Batteries are kept in a locked cabinet. the key holder works 10-4 Monday through Thursday.

    Everyone has battery powered keyboards and mice. The thermostat is battery powered and for some reason burns through batteries quickly. At one point, all three bathrooms had battery operated automatic soap dispensers. The batteries died and no one replaced them.

  183. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

    My first boss was obsessed with the clear, strong “book tape” used to repair tears and affix call numbers. Over and over, if a student asked for tape or if we needed to put up a poster, she would rush across the room, waving her hands, “DON’T USE THE BOOK TAPE! IT’S EXPENSIVE! IT’S ONLY FOR BOOKS!”
    Dear reader, book tape costs $12 a roll and we use less than one roll per year. We actually spend more per year on plain scotch tape. Perhaps Boss had suffered some terrible PTSD-inducing book tape accident long in the past, but it wasn’t during the 2 years I worked with her.

  184. Luanne Platter*

    Distribution center here- Paper packing lists!!! They’re clearly the worst part of my day, incredibly wasteful, stressful on the hand joints, constantly falling off the packaging material. We could easily digitize these and either email or store them on the website in the customer’s ordering portal but “noooooooo tHe cUstOmeRs WoN’t lIKe tHat”

  185. Ellis Bell*

    In my high school it’s guillotines. There aren’t really enough of them, they’re expensive and you get a lot of eye rolling/delays/passive aggressveness if you want to order one for your department or for an out of the way classroom. But, they save a lot of time at the printer (Sizing double worksheets on one piece of paper and cutting a stack of worksheets in half, means half as long as the printer in the morning). It’s also impossible for kids to paste a full sheet of A4 neatly into an exercise book a few centimetres smaller (I have never understood this about exercise book sizes) and it saves paper. Everyone who has a guillotine has their name and department pasted on it in large letters. Yet, this doesn’t stop them being borrowed and located elsewhere. It’s not uncommon to find a guillotine labelled “For Spanish department use only” stashed behind some boxes in the Maths office. If you do discover an illicit guillotine in the wrong place, you keep quiet because now you have access to one, and the stashers can’t say anything to you about using it. Of course we’re short on everything, and anything and anything not nailed down goes walking, but teachers are used to buying their own staplers and pens…. we seem to draw the line at guillotines.

    1. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

      You… you mean long-arm paper cutters, right?
      Where I’m from guillotines are only for heads.

    2. SLG*

      My college cafeteria kitchen was run by a wonderful woman from Quebec who called the thing she used to cut bagels her guillotine. Every now and then when she lost track of it you’d hear this loud voice coming from the kitchen, in a French accent, “WHERE IS MY GUILLOTINE…”

  186. Dry Erase Aficionado*

    My predecessors in my current role loved paper. They would print reports and scan them to email them to other people and then file the paper copies. There are draft after draft of every application and contract. Files from providers long departed from the organization. So. Much. Paper. I had 17 drawers full of paper when I started, and have found about half a dozen useful items.

    But, one thing I did find last year was the raised insert piece that goes in the credit card thing where you put in the double carbon form and the handle thing over it and the person’s card to take an imprint. I cannot remember the last time I saw one of those machines and I imagine I am one of few people in my office who has ever seen one, let alone used one. But, the insert plates were safely filed away.

  187. cityMouse*

    Oh gods, I work with a hoarder. The things that get saved or angsted over… hangers, especially. I get snarled at if I try to clean up. I have to wait til they’re away and then I can tidy up. How can you find anything when it’s all stuffed willy-nilly into boxes and squirrelled away? Why are we saving these things? I don’t understand.

  188. But that’s not MY pen*

    I worked at an architectural and engineering firm everyone had their favorite red pen for marking up drawings, the former supply orderer used to order 9 different styles of red pens! If someone’s favorite was out of stock you’d have thought a child was kidnapped.

    She was smart when she decided to keep 3 of the top executives favorites in her desk drawer for emergency situations.

    The receptionist got tired of her pens disappearing so ordered and paid for 100 pens imprinted with Stolen from the receptionist desk on them.

  189. LabSnep*

    Every lab I’ve worked in, when someone has retired, there has been a gleeful decommissioning of some useless thing that someone REFUSED to stop using from like 1975 or something. Cleaning up for accreditation always unearths new and exciting treasures even though it’s done all the time. I swear this stuff has legs.

    In some rural places, the backup machines being limped along still use DOS and floppy disks.

    It’s wild.

    1. LabSnep*

      Oh, we also have an entire closet FULL of printer cartridges for printers we haven’t had for decades, apparently, and some of which are so obsolete they would no longer be supported if we did.

      But yet for some reason we are not allowed to throw them out or donate them anywhere.

  190. BeeKay*

    When I started working at a certain computer research lab, the admin ordered me a box of personalized note pads, about 40 of them. I still have about three quarters of them, thirty years and six jobs later.

  191. Bex*

    In 2021, I was temping as an admin assistant at an accounting firm for tax season and during my first few days there, one of the accountants stopped by my desk to tell me that he was going to email me the text of a letter that needed to be printed on company letterhead and mailed to a client. As he was leaving, he stopped and said “Oh, do you know how to use the, uhh-“ and gestured towards the copy room. I made an assumption and said yes I did know how to use the postage meter, to which he replied “No not the postage meter, do you know how to use the typewriter?” …what part of this task would involve a typewriter? I was baffled. He was baffled – how else would I type the client’s address on the outside of the envelope? It can’t be handwritten! That’s unprofessional! To which I replied that of course I wasn’t going to handwrite their address, I was going to type it in Word and print it on the envelope using the printer??? He seemed unsure that this was a viable solution but left me to “figure it out on my own.” This accountant was in his 30s. I was in my 30s. Their year-round admin assistant was a woman in her 70s who preferred to type on a typewriter for anything that wasn’t standard letter-size paper, and apparently the whole office had just decided that this was the only way to do it? And for the rest of that tax season it was a running joke that I was “too young to know how to use a typewriter” ????????

    1. Ashie*

      I’ll be honest, I’d much rather use a typewriter on an envelope than fight with the stupid printer about which side and which direction the stupid envelope should be fed into the stupid paper feeder.

      1. Dancing Otter*

        Or address labels! Even if I get the addresses aligned properly for the right size label stock, which never ever works the first or even the second time, they either print upside down or on the back, or else they jam the high speed printer.
        Window envelopes for me, thank you!

  192. Brain the Brian*

    Oh! I forgot about The Mugs. A couple of years ago, my company updated our logo, and HR ordered new mugs for the office with the new logo on them. After several months of the new and old mugs coexisting peacefully, our HR director decided she’d had enough, confiscated every mug with the old logo she could find, and threw them all in the trash. People. Were. Furious.

    I got a tip-off that she was doing this and hid mine, so now I have one of maybe two mugs left in the whole office still branded with my company’s old logo. I keep it hidden, just in case.

  193. Inkognyto*

    Good solid pens are hoarded.

    Like ones with actual flowing ink in them. They are also expensive.

    I don’t use much for ‘office’ supplies too much anymore than a pen and post it.

    every company I am at has moved paperless. You bring the laptop into a meeting and write notes etc. Also especially in healthcare, it’s less people keeping stuff that needs to be shredded because there’s nothing to print with.

  194. BaffledByThePlastic*

    Three words: plastic punched pockets. The ones that go inside lever arch folders? There are always at least 6 packs in the stationery cupboard at any given time, and SOMEONE is using them despite pretty much everything we do being virtual. I despair at the sheer amount of plastic being ordered by our office ‍♀️.

  195. Sticky notes are sticky*

    Early 90s, first “real” job. Work involved going through paper files (some were really thick) and flagging items for a co-worker to review. We used strips of yellow writing pad paper stuck between pages. This seemed fraught with risk, so I asked the manager where we kept the post-it notes. She looked at me like I was committing armed robbery and said post-its were only for use by managers. Director came around glad-handing a few days later. When he asked me how it was going, I told him we all need post-it notes and explained why. We all got boxes of them the next day. Manager was perplexed.

  196. Ex-prof*

    My first teaching job, I was issued a stapler and told that I must have it on the last day of school to turn in for my final paycheck.

    Later I was warned by a veteran teacher that I should take it home two weeks before the end of school because other teachers, having lost their own staplers, might try to purloin mine. I took it home.

    Mind you, this was not a brand-new stapler. It was probably older than I was.

  197. BW*

    This goes back 40 years to my first job. We had a Burroughs electric adding machine. It was one of the “newer” (notice the quote marks) adding machines. Instead of columns of buttons, it had a keypad like a push button phone with just 10 digits and a couple of operators (+ and -). It did not have an electric read out. It only had a roll of paper tape. But Burroughs housed the thing in a plastic case the exact size and shape of an electric typewriter. We kept it on a rolling typing table with a dust cover over it. People would come into our office and ask to borrow the typewriter. We said SURE, and they’d wheel the adding machine out. Then 5 minutes later, they wheeled it back in. Why we didn’t throw it out, I don’t know. We never used it.

  198. Sled Dog Mama*

    Hmm… I’m looking around my office and the thing that strikes me is my file cabinet. I don’t actually keep any files in it, one drawer has snacks and drinks, the locking drawer has a couple of items that are required to be kept locked up and the other two drawers a FILLED with binders of records that I have yet to get a straight answer on keep/toss.

    The big one at my workplace is desk calendars. People here love their desk calendars and get a new one every year. No one ever seems to write on them but gosh darn they must have one and it needs to be current.

  199. coffeespoons*

    One legendarily terrible longtime employee at my office, Dolores, did not handle the transition to a more paperless office very well, to put it mildly. The office used to have to print out thousands of pages of reports on, let’s say, individual llamas that had been groomed, and review the printed documents, but eventually switched to reviewing the documents as PDFs instead as part of an overall trend to digital versus paper. This is only a hypothesis, but I think this may have been one reason why Dolores developed a scarcity mindset around office supplies that are used for paper documents, like staples and highlighters.

    How do I know that Dolores developed a fixation with hoarding staples and highlighters? Well, after she retired, I was the one who went through her workstation after she’d taken home all her personal items. I was getting the space ready for a new hire to move in, and when I cleaned out her desk, I found, I kid you not, two entire unopened boxes of staples and three pristine, full boxes of highlighters. This was in addition to the assorted loose highlighters in her desk drawers, of which I found about a dozen. Reader, there was no shortage of available highlighters, in every color option–not only were there tons of them in the building’s main supply cupboards, but the day I cleared out Dolores’s desk, I also found four full boxes in the supply cabinet located THREE FEET from Dolores’s desk. Nor was the office undergoing any dire staple-famine–they were everywhere.

    The supply hoarding was strange enough on its own, but doesn’t quite compare to the weirdest thing I found in Dolores’s desk that day: several twelve-inch bamboo skewers, pointed at one end. WTF Dolores was doing with all these bamboo skewers at her desk job, I will never know, but it definitely makes me wonder about the time she spent working alone from the building during COVID.

  200. Buni*

    The person before me meant to order 20 erasers, which would have kept the whole business supplied for the next ten years. She ordered 20 *boxes*.

    When I left that job there were still 19.75 boxes in the cupboard…

  201. Karma is My Boyfriend and so is Travis Kelce*

    Started my current job last April, and my boss started last March. In about June, a coworker announced there was a BRAND NEW 11×17 clipboard to take to site visits and where the sign out sheet (and clipboard) was located. People went crazy with joy. My boss was agog and goes “do you all want your OWN clipboards? I can get them for you!?!?!” She and I were both left wondering why the prior manager seemed to not allow everyone getting their own clipboard.

  202. Msd*

    Admin refused to buy any pens except cheap ball point ones with caps. They were the worse at leaking ink. In any meeting if you looked around the majority of people had ink-stained fingers.

  203. Feral Humanist*

    I had a colleague, “Leroy,” at a previous job whose desk was COVERED in tchotchkes. He and the head of HR (who was very invested in the aesthetic of our office) had a slow-burn civil war going over all the personal items Leroy displayed on his desk against policy.

    One of the more useful things Leroy hoarded at his desk were staplers from about the time he arrived at the organization in the 1970s. They were very, very effective but also incredibly heavy. I once joked that if a zombie apocalypse ever invaded our offices, we could defend ourselves pretty well using Leroy’s collection of solid metal staplers. (But also any time I needed to staple anything, I went to Leroy!)

    Leroy also kept a typewriter at his desk for the sole purpose of typing up his annual self-evaluation every year. I pointed out that he could do it on his computer by downloading an MS Word doc (our evals were not complicated), to which he replied: “I don’t download things.”

    I sort of miss Leroy.

  204. I watered your plants while you had covid*

    I am in charge of ordering office supplies.
    I did throw away the phone message pads when we got a new supply cabinet recently
    I swear all my people just EAT pens at the rate they go through them (I have been a creeper and I have a list of every person I work with and what pens they like)
    Graph paper pads – our former supervisor got them special ordered, one of my people only likes the really old recycled paper ones that are grey (you can’t buy them anymore).
    Binder clips don’t actually reproduce, I just take them out of the files before they go to archives.

  205. nozenfordaddy*

    I love myself a 4″x6″ lined Post-it note. And my company used to stock them. I had them on my desk always. Stuck to my monitors, my shelves, my legal pad. Then one day they decided they would no longer buy them. Our office admin knowing my love of them basically brought me the last unopened package we had like: hoard these. So I did.

    When I eventually ran out I bought myself more. I wasn’t going to stop using them and frankly I get paid enough to maintain a Post-it addiction.

    1. spuffyduds*

      Ooh those are GREAT. They work really well in combo with a bullet journal since you can use them to add in a grocery list or some such thing that doesn’t need to live in your bujo forever.

  206. spcepickle*

    Rite In Rain Notebooks.
    All my field staff have nice truck set-ups with charges, hot spots, and laptops. Plus iPad and cell phones. Yet they all want rite in rain notebooks and they all want different types (spiral bond or not, different sizes). They are the only office supply you have to ask the admin for or people will take the whole order at once.

    I am the manager who approved us recycling the huge walk in closet full of metal paper sorters (3 stacks of paper, in and out boxes, vertical paper storage). We kept 2 of each type in-case a new hire needed one.

    1. Beancounter Eric*

      Rite in the Rain also have letter/legal, A3/A4, Tabloid size paper, along with card stock, loose leaf paper, recipe cards.

      RECIPE CARDS!!!

      And all of it weather resistant!!

      1. spcepickle*

        We joke that my team must write lots of very sad poetry in the bathtub with the number of notebooks they go through!

  207. seespotbitejane*

    OMG! I a job a few years ago that had *tons* of these. I organized them all into what I called the Obsolete Technology Cupboard, full of adding machines and unopened boxes of floppy disks.

    But the most important device was the electric typewriter. It lived on my desk. When I started I was told it got tons of use because it was the only way we could make these special stickers.

    After about 9 months of never being called upon to make these stickers I got tired of those thing taking up about 2 square feet of desk space. So I put it in an empty cupboard and waited to see if anybody even noticed. This was a place where everybody reacted very badly to any tiny change.

    It took my boss 2 full weeks to notice it was gone but when she did, she had a full on meltdown. “What happened to the typewriter?!” I was seriously worried she was going to cry. I don’t know if she thought I’d thrown it away or what. I calmly answered that I needed the space so I’d put it in that cupboard right there. It was still in this very room.
    “But what about when we need to make the special stickers?!”

    I said it hadn’t happened yet, but if it did I would… get the typewriter back out of the cupboard. That mildly pacified her but she was still deeply skeptical and certain that I would regret my actions when it was time to finally make these stickers. I worked there for 2 more years and never had to make the special stickers.

  208. River*

    It actually wasn’t until a few months ago that I noticed that my nice pens were going missing. I have a glass cup at my desk with these nice pens. I have them on the farther end of my desk next to the wall. Where I sit, to the left of me is a wall, behind me is a wall, and to the right is my open area where I walk in and out of. Well this glass mug is near my left wall and so I thought people wouldn’t go directly behind my desk when I’m not around. At least to me, it would feel like an invasion of privacy. But it wasn’t until I noticed that my favorite nice pen went missing when I looked into the mug and some were gone. I realize that keeping things out in the open makes them susceptible to theft but where I work, things never go missing, until now. As a pain in the patoot it is, I have placed the nice pens in my locked drawer. So every morning, unlock the drawer and take out 2 pens. At the end of the day, put the pens back in my drawer and lock it. This could be just a matter of people borrowing a pen for a quick note or something and then they accidentally or “Accidentally” take it home. But still these pens are not cheap and some are branded pens from vendors and businesses that I never had the chance to use. Hopefully one day I can resort to not worrying about my special pens being taken.

  209. Rosyglasses*

    It’s my own home office, but I am in love with:

    1 – Fabriano spiral notebooks, blank pages. I use them religiously for every meeting even though much of my work is digital.
    2 – Tūl brand pens : I will fight anyone who says there is another pen that writes better :-)

    1. spuffyduds*

      And anyone who listens to Productivity Alchemy is shouting “TUUUUUUL!” (at least in their heads)

  210. FrantictoFarming*

    This is probably more in the arena of “equpiment” than “supplies”, but it was definately a relic. My first job out of college was at a company where many employees worked there for 20-30+ years. I was 2008, so computers were far from “new technology”. One woman in the order management department refused to use her computer to “type up” bills of materials for manufactured items. She would input the order on her computer, roll over to her type writer, and type up on carbon copy paper the Pick tickets and bills of material and then walk them down to the manufacturing floor…where someone else would just print everything off the order from the system.

  211. They Call Me Patricia*

    In addition to the two-hole punch I mentioned earlier, we had another obsession:

    Our office manager had two very large, very heavy, very old electric typewriters, which she used for EVERYTHING. One was on her desk, and one was a backup in case the first one broke.
    Office correspondence, addressing envelopes, even our paychecks and paystubs were typed out on these typewriters. Using a computer for any of these jobs was the ultimate last resort. The office finally ditched typewritten paychecks a few years ago because employees were constantly asking for income verification letters. The typewritten checks looked so fake that banks and landlords didn’t accept them as proof of income. But the office manager held onto the typewriters for everything else until she retired in 2022.

  212. Pounce de Lion*

    I was very attached to the typewriter in our office and even stocked up on replacement ribbons before they went out of production. I suspect Ol’ Man Selectric was junked the minute I left that job. Looking back, I have to smile at how kind they were to put up with my nonsense.

  213. Bookworm*

    Once worked at an internship where someone absolutely flipped their lid over a missing ice pack. No idea if it was for an injury, to keep cool, etc. but this person was MAD. They got it back but it was a little awkward. I was just an intern and a new one so I don’t know who it was (this was also years ago).

    Worked at a law firm where I noticed a particular tea disappeared. Box in the recycling, the tea bags gone. Around the same time it was reported that people’s lunches were disappearing (!). We had a group of new employees temporarily on our floor because there was no space in their respective departments and we did. The thefts disappeared when they finally moved to their respective spaces, but I don’t know if the thief was never found out or if people made the connection.

  214. Coverage Associate*

    Typewriters! Every law firm I worked at before November kept a typewriter long after all forms were fillable pdfs.

    At my last law firm, I went to the supply room to get a binder clip for a client I knew well. I found some pretty colored ones. I pull one out of the jar, and it has spikes! Apparently they were for an old office with cloth walled cubicles.

    When we cleaned out the meeting room at church shortly before the pandemic, I found daily P&L reports from decades back and checkbooks for long closed accounts. Then I got resistance shredding these.

  215. just a random teacher*

    My first year of teaching, I took a job being the computer and math teacher in a small, rural town. I had 6 different preps and no curriculum for several of them including a math class, but that’s a story for a different thread.

    Anyway, for my no-curriculum computer class I was improvising as hard as I could. Due to a fight between my school principal (who felt that middle school students were not responsible enough to have email addresses) and the person at the ESD in charge of the LMS (who felt that he was not going to create a weird work-around so that students could have LMS accounts without the perfectly good email addresses he was happy to create for them) I was suddenly without a way for students to share files with each other. (This fight happened when the ESD started offering student email accounts in the middle of the year, so it didn’t impact my fall term classes but meant I needed a new plan for spring semester.)

    Thankfully, there were boxes and boxes of 3.5 floppy disks in the supply cabinet (still in their shrink wrap!) and the school secretary very reluctantly let me have one (1) box of ten (10) disks to use since I was the computer teacher. By a minor miracle, the brand new computers had also been ordered with floppy drives, so I would hand out a floppy disk to students when they needed to pass files among their team members for group projects since they could no longer use the LMS to share files for group work (and, of course, could not email things to each other). (Actual student work would be saved on the network in their student accounts so it could be accessed from any computer, but students didn’t have a a way to share files over that network.)

    At the end of the year, about 3 students asked if they could use a floppy disk to take their work home with them. (Most students either did not want copies of their classwork or had thumb drives.) Sure, I said, and off they went.

    The school secretary was very cross with me for not turning all 10 disks back in at the end of the year, since we would need them again next year. (I was leaving the district, so turned over all of my stuff at the end of the year for redistribution rather than keeping it in my classroom.)

    This was in 2007.

  216. Gibby*

    Toilet Paper. Yep, you read that right, Toilet Paper.

    Office of 3 women, who are here all day, and 25+ men who come in the morning and we don’t see again until the next morning. Where the TP goes? Nobody knows.

    We keep our rolls locked in our offices.

  217. Forrest Rhodes*

    A strong second to the binder clip conversation. I buy packages of them in assorted colors and use them all over the house: keep the bag of dry cat food closed; keep the toothpaste tube rolled to the proper level; clip half-used bags of frozen food closed in the freezer; and oh, yeah, sometimes actually keeping a stack of related documents together.
    When they visit, the (now-adult) kids in my family are constantly trying to make off with the clips; I’ve had to institute a TSA-type search process before I let the kids out the front door.

  218. Just Another Fed*

    Have I needed to put anything in a three-ring binder in a decade? No, but you’ll still pry my three-hole punch out of my cold, dead hands. I might need it some day! If nothing else, it’s big and heavy and I could kill spiders with it.

  219. Emotional support capybara (he/him)*

    We had a curséd relic: a never-used, still shrinkwrapped cube of branded Post-It notes.

    ENRON branded Post-It notes.

    I haven’t seen this artifact since we moved to a new location a few months ago but it sat on a back shelf, in plain sight, untouched, for the whole 18 years I’ve worked here.

    1. Non-profit drone*

      You could probably sell that to a Hollywood movie prop supplier! I can just see Charlie Sheen tossing it at his secretary.

  220. Not Your Nacho*

    When I started at my current job the lady I replaced had so many office supplies hoarded (sticky notes, pens, staples you name it) that I thought I had the office supply closet.

  221. L. Ron's Cupboard*

    When I left my previous job, I swiped the red Swingline stapler that I’d hoarded for years. For the amount of work I put into making sure it never left my desk, I wasn’t going to leave it behind.

    Not sure this qualifies, but we had 2 remote controls that operated 6 TVs in the office. People would constantly change the channels late at night (we were staffed from 6am to midnight) to watch a ballgame or something, and in the morning people would walk in to find the TVs set to morning kiddie shows and wouldn’t be able to find the remotes to change the station back to, say, the news channels. I finally took both remotes, kept them in my desk and sent an email to the whole office to say if you wanted to change the stations, you had to find me to get the remote. That way if it never found its way back, I’d know who to come after. Worked a treat til COVID sent us all home and we cut the cable service entirely.

  222. LibraryAnne*

    At my library, we are always short on paperclips, post-it notes, black sharpie markers and the large H-bands that we use to bundle books into themed bundles. We also are always missing erasers from our pencils. At my old branch, we kept a GIANT pink eraser, about a foot long, that people could use at the library if they needed an eraser. That eraser had the library’s name printed on it and never left the building, even though it made many people laugh when they needed to use it.

  223. Medieval Peasant*

    All this talk of Good Pens reminded me of the days when I worked in a field laboratory, and pens of any variety had a tendency to go missing. People would sign something or fill in a data booklet and then walk away with the pen, never to be seen again. One day I got so tired of all my pens going missing that I decided to take a tip from nature and deploy a “mast seeding” event. I went to Office Depot and purchased a huge pack of cheap pens I found in the bargain bin (and despite the low, low price they were actually really good! Very smooth black ink, easy to write with). I took these and secretly distributed them by the handful in every office. Pens for everyone! More pens than could ever be consumed in a year!

    Somehow, this worked. I had more pens at my desk than I knew what to do with, everyone was happy, and for some reason nobody questioned the sudden abundance of pens. Predator satiation in action!

  224. Nat20*

    Apparently in some circles of academia there are incredibly strong preferences for chalk & chalkboards in classrooms. I’ve heard that some people are very adamant about needing chalk. I started teaching at a different university in the fall, and while my previous one had almost exclusively whiteboards in classrooms, the classrooms I’ve been assigned so far at the new one have all had chalkboards. Guess there’s more of that preference here.

    But god, I hate chalk. I adore whiteboards. I’ve been using the boards in my classes less than I would like, just so I can avoid using chalk. Ugh.

    I even bought a fresh new set of dry erase markers in all sorts of lovely colors in August in preparation! How could I have known. They now still sit on my desk, sad, lonely, and gathering dust, having never once been used. To each their own and if you like chalk then power to ya, but I’m still upset about my poor unused markers.

  225. Tann*

    I work in a library – we don’t have a card catalog anymore but if you dig deep enough in the supply cabinet there are boxes and boxes of blank catalog cards. And typewriter ribbon.

  226. LibraryCapybara*

    When I started at this job, there were 12 full time people, plus a handful of part-time student assistants. Over the years, through a round of re-organizations and retirements, we have dwindled to just 2 people. When it came time to move us to a different office, we had to clean up the detritus of 15 desks. There were so many extra supplies that we ended up stacking them up across 3 desks and a 12 foot long conference table and invited the whole building to come shop. We had piles of binders, massive stacks of inbox trays, boxes full of binder clips, and enough paperclips to supply the world. Additionally, I found little stashes of book mending supplies in every nook of the office. Everything you can possibly imagine was saved Just In Case It Might Be Useful. It was a little intimidating to see how much stuff can accumulate over decades.

  227. ButIt'sBetter*

    In my government office, there is one three hole punch that punches *slightly* larger holes than the other three hole punches. One secretary had it locked in her cabinet for the whole 20 years she’d been here. When she left, she bequeathed it to me. It’s one of the heavy old metal ones, and is in constant danger of being sent to surplus and replaced by a terrible plastic one. I now have a covert team of people who keep an eye out for it and return it to my office if it ever wanders out into the world. We keep repairing it when it starts to get wonky. I have to start thinking about who I’m going to give it to when I leave.

  228. Kay Tee*

    My last job had an adding machine on every desk. I think it was the sweet, older CFO’s doing.

  229. TinLizi*

    I worked at a historic site and museum. There was a fax machine, and I was supposed to fax in the monthly visitor attendance numbers. I reached out to everyone I sent it to and asked if an emailed pdf would work. They said it was preferred.

    I still wasn’t allowed to get rid of the fax machine. So, during a deep clean (very necessary in old buildings), I “accidentally” unplugged the fax. When no one noticed for a year, I tossed it. That was 10 years ago. They still haven’t noticed.

  230. Dawn*

    I’m a teacher, and at my first school, teachers were not allowed to use the laminator unless under direct supervision of the director. She claimed it was because teachers kept breaking it, but in my five years there, no one used it because no one was allowed to. I was helping her with a project at one point near the end of my time there, and she took me into the teacher workroom and let me use the laminator while she hovered over me to make sure I was doing it right.

    When I moved to my current school, I was embarrassed, as an experienced teacher, to have to ask a colleague to show me how to use the laminator because I’d never used one (except that one time!!) because I’d never been allowed!

  231. SMH*

    I was the office manager at a mid-size government agency. When I took over, the supply room was constantly running out of scotch tape. As soon as it ran out, I would get emails asking: when will it be restocked? Why was it allowed to run out? What was I doing about this? Employees were going over my head to the Director asking about the freaking tape. Meanwhile no one could tell me why we used so much tape! We were a largely paperless organization. We weren’t doing arts and crafts.

    One day I was running someone envelopes through this heat sealer machine we had. Someone saw me, and said, “OMG! When did that get fixed?” It turns out, a year prior, the machine had broken. And even though it had been fixed within a week, no one knew somehow. And then everyone had started taping their letters shut. That’s where all the tape was going.

  232. Fax Queen*

    I don’t care about the fax machine itself, and I have never used it, but the spam faxes we get? They’re mine. I can get you great deals on business loans, roofing repairs, conferences in Las Vegas, exotic cars… I keep them all on my desk and they bring me great joy. There’s hundreds of them. Send help.

    2. Nightengale*

      oh we still get those (medical office)

      I let my pediatric patients draw on the backs of them

  233. Lucy P*

    Slide projector, adding machine (the kind with the crank on the side of it), used phone messages books with messages dating back to the 90s, a 12″ data tape reel, an oscilloscope. None of these are used anymore.

    We have a typewriter that types, but the other electronic functions like memory storage died along time ago. We keep carbon paper just in case.

    We’re not allowed to buy new folders, unless for presentation purposes. Every year when the shredder service comes by, we have to pull the old papers out of their folders for shredding and then reuse the folders. Last month I grabbed a folder that had 4 layers of folder labels with the oldest dating back to 1995.

    The staff accountant still uses an impact printer and DOS based accounting software that won’t work on any modern OS so the tech had to install a virtual PC using Windows 2000.

  234. Beebs*

    1) Electric hole punch. I have to punch holes in paper about once a year but they will take that beautiful piece of equipment out of my office when I retire, not before.

    2) Giant stapler with lever arm that can go through 100 sheets of paper with industrial-sized staples. Again, I use it about once a year. But SO satisfying.

  235. Jill Swinburne*

    Pens in general. I used to order two boxes and keep them locked in my drawer, and they still kept disappearing.

  236. Euphony*

    My first office job was at a large and well known retail company where the standard monitor for your desktop PC was not adjustable. Getting an adjustable monitor stand required a health & safety desk assessment to demonstrate that you genuinely Really needed it, and management approval for the cost of the stand. If you got one in less than 6 months you were lucky.
    This retail company also produced a very nice hard back catalogue of its products 4 times a year, copies of which were issued to all staff. Everybody used their catalogues as monitor stands and there was always a stack of old catalogues in every department – ostensibly for “reference”, but actually to ensure a nice variety of different height catalogues for whatever height you wanted your monitor at.

    1. NMitford*

      When I worked in Big Five accounting, everyone used their firm-supplied copy of the Internal Revenue Code as a monitor stand.

  237. Kit*

    Oh, have I ever got a story for this one.

    I previously worked at a small branch office of a large company. One quirk of the team I worked on was that we would print and bind most of our hard-copy reports in-house, using a (large, clunky, and kind of difficult to use) manual binding machine to punch and bind all our reports. The other team that worked out of the same office (but weren’t really connected to the work my team did), generally just paid to have their things printed at Staples or wherever, and in fact refused to learn to use the binding machine because they didn’t want to use it.

    Fast forward a few years, nearly everyone at this branch office has quit – we’re down to literally just me and one guy from this other team. Corporate decides that it’s not worth continuing to lease the office space for just the two of us and they’re going to close the office and push us full-time remote. (I’m on my way out by now too and have already put in my notice, but I’m basically staying to help close this office location.) At this point, I’m told that I’m free to take whatever I can use in terms of office supplies/equipment, and to find takers for anything I can, because our corporate overlords aren’t interested in keeping things, so anything that doesn’t have a home by the end of the month is getting thrown away/recycled/donated. I spend a decent amount of time finding homes for headsets, 3-ring binders, surplus paper, whiteboards, and other office miscellany.

    Everything except the binding machine.

    Other Guy’s boss (who is not onsite) has suddenly decided that since he has access to this binding machine, he should really be binding his own documents instead of paying someone to do it, and so he will be keeping the binding machine, which he hates and does not use. He spends several occasions complaining that this is going to be So Much More Difficult than the way they’ve done things before, why can’t he just keep going to Staples, it probably costs more to pay him to bind a report than it does to pay for copies, etc.

    Until I, quite selflessly, offer to make the binding machine Mysteriously Disappear so he doesn’t need to learn how to use it and he decides that actually, he’s going to dig in his heels on keeping this binding machine that he absolutely does not want because I’ve threatened it. He WILL be keeping this binding machine, and if anyone else tries to lay claim to it, my boss (also offsite) needs to talk to his boss, and he’ll handle it if it needs to be shipped somewhere, don’t worry about it, he definitely needs to keep this thing he doesn’t even want.

    I guarantee he’s never once used the damn thing since I left.

    1. Kit*

      Oh! Also!

      I now work, again, for a small branch office of a large company. We have no on-site admin staff, so our office supply orders are handled by someone in our nearest main office 5 hours away.

      We recently asked her to order us some extra-large binder clips, which we occasionally need for large packets of papers. She happily did so – and sent us 24 twelve-packs of extra large binder clips. 288 binder clips! For our office of three staff. We’re set for these for the next decade, easily.

  238. see you anon*

    Holy relic that I asked about pitching, but understand why we keep it (re: patient communications for some of our clinicians): the fax machine.

    Hoarded supplies: catering supplies. Last summer I gave myself a space/ops project of reorganizing our supply room, and the number of black plastic catering tongs I threw out alone! Three plastic grocery bags’-worth, and those were just the broken, gross, or oldest looking ones. It didn’t feel good tossing so much plastic (our region doesn’t recycle it), but we *could not* just hold onto them all. I’ve identified the employee who keeps the old catering supplies, and surreptitiously dispose of the older/grosser/unnecessary supplies when they’re not around.

  239. Anonymous Badger*

    When I started at my current job, it wasn’t one useless or old thing people kept, it was everything. I work for an environmental non-profit, and people took not throwing things out to the extreme, so much that when I went to find a pen and notebook on my first day, the supply closets were stuffed full of used notebooks, bags full of sharpies and pens and dry erase markers that didn’t work and hadn’t in years, file folders that had been clearly used and reused (like half-inch thick sticky labels to designate what they were) that were falling apart and were useless now, a dozen ancient, broken phones . . . like you name it, we had it. No one wanted to throw it out. It “felt” wrong because we worked in the environmental sector and surely everything could be used again SOMEHOW.

    So COVID hit, all the staff except me and one other part-time admin were sent to work from home, and I couldn’t take it anymore after trying to find a single file folder that wasn’t falling apart. I went after those closets with a vengeance. I don’t even know how many bags full of recycling and trash I filled up anymore that took multiple weeks of bringing out to our tiny bins to get rid of for good.

    Most folks were relieved, though I did get a couple of people that grumbled at first about “optics” even though, not surprisingly, the public had better things to do than to monitor or dig through the trash and recycling bins and no complaints ever actually materialized.

    1. Person from the Resume*

      I struggle with this too personally. But if you’re not using it anymore, and you can’t find anyone who wants because it it’s old technology, it’s not being useful sitting in storage closet.

  240. Forrest Rhodes*

    Disappearing pens:
    Many years ago I was a student part-time employee working for three professors in the university’s civil engineering department. The small office in which I worked had two desks—one mine, and one for occasional use by the profs or the grad students and undergrads who’d stop by the office for different reasons.

    I soon realized that every time someone stopped in, one of my pens or mechanical pencils would leave with them—and these were my own things, bought on a starving-student budget.

    Finally I put a sign on the door, visible at eye level as you left the office:
    “All Writing Implements in This Office
    Have Been Treated with a Toxic Substance.
    The Minute You Step Out of The Office with One of Them,
    Your P**is Will Fall Off.”

    At the time, most of the CE students were male and I guess they weren’t willing to risk the sign being true: my writing implements quickly stopped disappearing. The few female CE students were always laughing too hard at the sign to steal anything.

  241. Just another content creator*

    I worked for OldCompany, a primarily print marketing firm transitioning to digital-focused that hoarded all kinds of outdated publishing tools and materials “just in case.” Our archives were INSANE – do we really need 100 copies of each edition of a monthly travel mag that’s already been digitized and hasn’t been a thing in 10 years? Apparently. But the biggest scandal had nothing to do with that.

    After a rebranding, OldCompany purchased a ton of swag in the new fun colors – sunglasses, notebooks, pens, etc. They also ordered t-shirts that were actually super soft and comfortable. Everyone got to select their size and color for one shirt each, and the buzz about who chose which color and why was all anyone could talk about for a week. (Somehow the color you chose said something about your personality or work persona? Some people really got into the “You picked a green shirt, so you’d never understand where a purple shirt person is coming from,” type of thinking.)

    After awhile, people began showing up in different colors than they originally had, and the whispers started. If someone wore a different colored company shirt, gossip, judgment, and snooty comments like, “I can’t believe Fergus has worn a different company shirt each day this week, he must be the new golden child who can do whatever he wants!” ran wild. A coworker in charge of the interns handed out a couple of shirts each at the start of the summer, and rule-followers lost their minds over it (“How dare INTERNS get MULTIPLE awesome t-shirts when I’ve been here 20+ years and only got one!”). Some people took it upon themselves to inventory the remaining shirts and attempt to police how they were given out, but leadership couldn’t care less.

    When new shirts arrived a couple of years later, whoever ordered them must’ve been totally over the t-shirt drama because they picked crappy, sweat sponge material polos in garish hues that no one liked or wore for anything other than a group photo session on the day they arrived.

  242. Sleeping Panther*

    One of my former coworkers had a manager who held onto a set of tools for manually drawing Gantt charts until he retired in the mid-2010s. The projects they were working on were tens of thousands of lines long, and they’d switched to using program-planning software more than a decade prior.

  243. TanksTanksTanks*

    When a good friend of mine started his PhD, the admin of the lab collected a tweezer deposit before he got whatever special tweezers he was supposed to use. My friend kept the receipt during the 5 years it took him to get his degree, and then carefully returned the tweezers and displayed his receipt to get his deposit back. (It was certainly less than $5.) The director of the lab was Not Pleased at having to refund the deposit; it was perhaps the only time such a thing had ever happened.

  244. EngineeringFun*

    Zebra brand mechanical pencils with 0.7 lead and a retractable eraser is the only way to do calculations. Ever.

  245. NMitford*

    I worked for a company that had a dedicated, locked war room for proposal teams to work together. Due to the long hours on proposals, the company frequently ordered lunch and dinner for the teams. Extra sauce packets (ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, red pepper flakes, parmesan cheese, soy sauce, duck sauce, hot sauce….) that came with deliveries were routinely tossed into a brimming basket that sat on a bookshelf in the room in case someone needed it. One day I went thru the basket and checked the expiration dates on everything and ended up tossing easily three-fourths of the contents of that basket. There were ancient mayonnaise packets in there that could have sent an entire team home with food poisoning.

  246. bookwisp*

    I work at a library. We still have a typewriter here. I actually had to learn how to use it when I started 6 years ago because we were still hand typing the spine labels. (Thank god we switched to printable stickers during COVID)

  247. Emotional Spock*

    I’m a teacher at a well-to-do public school. It’s tissues. Facial tissues. For kid’s noses. To get one you have to go to the bookkeeper’s office waaaay at the front of the building. So, when I run out of tissues, I have to go to the front office area and go to the bookkeeper’s room. She gets her key and we go next door to the supply closet. She will give me TWO boxes. Sometimes she’s not there. She’s not there before school or after school so I can only get to it during my lunch or during planning. I’ve sent emails and get a “Come by my office” response. Sometimes we are totally out of tissues at our school and will wait days for our new supply. For a school with 1500 students. For a long time I would just get toilet paper and we’d all use it. Now whenever I see boxes on sale at the store I stock up. The most I’ve had in my classroom is 34 boxes.

  248. NoPrinterForYou*

    Access to print in color. I’ve been here for a few years now, and the first week I started I ONLY had access to the color printer because the main one hadn’t been set up by IT. I had to print something for my boss, and the office admin went OFF on me about how I should never use the color printer. She does this to everyone. It’s been years of listening to her be the gatekeeper of printing in color.

  249. notagirlengineer*

    20 years ago, I was a new mechanical designer working on a team of about 20 of the most quiet, diligent, hyper rational people I’ve ever met. My lead explained, “Here is the supply cabinet. You are supposed to just come here and use what you need, but nobody does that, so keep these at your desk because they aren’t always available.” He handed me an arm full of things from envelopes and pens to specialty tape that was the source of a lot of discussion, disagreement, and even feuds among everyone there. I worked there for nearly a decade, and when I left, I still had everything from that initial supply run except a few pens. We hardly used physical supplies at all, so all of that drama was simply left over from the days when design work was done by hand at drafting tables. No one ever even explained what made the specialty tape special or what it had ever been used for. I still have the tape to this day because my desk was packed up for me since I left when I went into labor and didn’t return to that job.

  250. Slovenly Braid Cultist*

    You’ll pry the special-order reproduction typewriter tapes out of my cold, dead hands, after what I went through to find them because someone absolutely INSISTED we must have them. They’re a battle trophy. I’m superstitiously convinced the office will collapse if they are removed from the closet.

    Back in 2015 or so, I asked the IT person if we could get rid of the random ZIP drive sitting in a desk cluster, after asking around and ascertaining that no one in the office had ever used it and most of them did not know what it was. Was told it was essential to maintaining our systems. Shrugged it off and left it alone; if it made IT happy, who was I to judge?

  251. ILoveLllamas*

    I have a couple of examples. One of my first jobs, the president of this small firm insisted on only using pink legal pads. This was basically his journal/notes for everything he worked on. No one else was allowed to use pink pads. No one.

    Past job with an engineering firm. One department insisted on having every color highlighter known to mankind. They kept an organizer chock full of said highlighters — all very neatly organized because they were, you know, engineers. They had to have had over 150 for a department of say 10 people. The office manager was in a constant battle with them to try to tamp down the highlighter obsession. It was a losing battle. Same firm, same office manager, had a very nice label maker. Now I love a label maker. This one was closely guarded, kept in its original box in an obscure cabinet, so you had to know where it was to be able to use it. My suggestion to keep it out of the box and available was considered ridiculous. Therefore, I kept taking it out of the box and keeping it for weeks hidden at my desk. No one ever knew….

  252. Stray Mom*

    Back in the day, at my former firm, it was a “COPY” stamp. We’d use it to stamp over a wet ink signature or a Notary acknowledgement before sending documents in for recording so that the clerk wouldn’t inadvertently record something that was merely presented for reference. Well. You’d think that stamp cost $$$ or was proprietary in some way, because every time I went looking for it, it was locked away in an Admin’s drawer. I finally brought my own.

  253. It_guy*

    I worked at a large trucking company at the corporate office a long time ago.

    There was a strict desk protocol. Based on your position you were not allowed to have a desk chair with arms. People would get into trouble for borrowing somebody else’s chair that you were not entitled to.

    The same type of rules applied to desk sets with pens.

  254. SLG*

    Sacred office supplies that didn’t need to be: Pre-Covid, my physical therapist told me to raise my laptop and monitor for ergonomic reasons. So, I stacked a bunch of reams of printer paper under both laptop and monitor, and moved on with my day.

    Then Covid arrived, and my entire company was told to work from home with 3 hours notice. I grabbed my laptop, stuffed a few notebooks and pens in my work bag, and left, thinking we’d return to normal in a couple of months. If I remember correctly I took the monitor with me too.

    19 months of work-from-home and one out-of-state move later, I resigned from that job. After a ridiculously convoluted process for requesting my small amount of stuff from the desk that had been mine (a jacket, a few business books, etc.), I was finally notified that it would all be shipped to me. Imagine my surprise when several boxes arrived at my door a few weeks later. They included a large, shockingly heavy box full of … reams and reams of blank printer paper. That had been on my desk underneath my (long gone) laptop and monitor.

    I have some grudging respect for whoever was told “box up the stuff at desk 125B” and performed exactly to task. I don’t want to know how much the company spent shipping it to me. And I will never, never run out of printer paper.

    1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      The one time I had to pack up someone’s desk to send home, I also had to sort out the stuff that was company property (like any drafts of proprietary information).

      Sorting the office supplies was easy. Anything that was polka-dotted was not company property, it was the former employee’s.

  255. me*

    I learned how to use a microfiche machine in the local law library to review legislative history that had yet to be converted to a .pdf

    When I worked in a place that used remote controls to run the a/c systems, when the seasons changed, the administrator would occasionally be tasked with going around and collecting the remote controls, despite the fact that the weather had not changed enough to go without a/c. whoever remembered to hide the remote controls would be very popular for a few weeks until they were not actually needed anymore. My supervisor bought a universal remote that he programmed to use the machines. I was gifted the magical remote control when he left, and it remained in my locked desk drawer until I, too, departed

  256. CatMintCat*

    I’m a teacher in a K-6 school. We have boxes and boxes of sticks of white chalk. The last chalkboard in the school was removed in roughly 2007. We are not allowed to use this chalk for anything else (art activities, maths activities). When I rule the world, this stock of chalk will be binned so fast, and the space freed up for something else (probably equally as useless).

  257. Sovreignry*

    At a law firm I was at my secretary had joined my boss, the managing partner, when they left the firm they were at to start the firm I was at. She stole every single stamp she could. Think “DRAFT” “RECEIVED” and others like it.

  258. Gronk*

    I’m a gynaecologist who started work in a regional town in Australia several years ago. One of the tools we use in operations is called a uterine “sound”. It measures the length of the uterus and is used quite often. When I started operating at this hospital I soon discovered that of the approximately 7 sounds this hospital had, 2 were marked in inches (the rest in centimetres). Each operation these come pre-packaged so I wouldn’t know until half way through the operation that I had one, then I’d ask for them to find me a centimetre marked one, and occasionally we’d have to open three lots before finding what I wanted.

    The person who ordered instruments for theatre offered to get additional centimetre marked sounds and eventually they came but they refused to throw out the inch marked ones “in case someone else wanted to use them later”. I was one of only two gynaecologists in town (the other had found her own work around where she didn’t use sounds at all). No other type of surgeon uses a uterine sound and even if they did, they would use one marked in inches! Australia converted to the metric system in 1970!!!

    2. Caramellow*

      Completely off topic but I’m an American and when I was in high school we had a program called “Metric 1970!” with banners and balloon. The thinking was that the US would fully embrace the metric system by 1970.

      54 years later, I still laugh.

  259. Jay*

    The company I work for has a cardboard box hoarding problem.
    There have been times where half the downstairs of the building (two floors, so about 1/4 of the total space of the entire building) has been filled with empty cardboard boxes people are saving in the event they have to mail something.
    Every so often someone in senior management will order me to clear them out.
    I’ve spent whole days breaking down, cutting up, and throwing out old cardboard boxes. I’ve filled entire dumpsters, multiple times.
    And then it all fills up again.
    I have become Carboard Sisyphus, Destroyer Of Boxes.

    2. Box Hoarder*

      I am guilty of this in my personal life. It’s mostly because I’m a renter and in the back of my mind, I know that one day I’ll have to move again, and the thought of having to buy or collect empty boxes when I have perfectly good boxes that are exactly the right size seems silly. I have the original boxes for my stereo components, which I bought 20+ years ago. I have boxes that I have reused for 5 separate moves over the past 20 years. I have flattened boxes stuffed everywhere – behind dressers, under the bed, in the back of the closets.

      1. Dragonfly7*

        I am guilty of the same as a renter. Two workplaces ago, I could count on being able to bring home the boxes our copy paper came in (a least a dozen every 3 months), but I rarely see real paper used in the two jobs since then.

        1. Box Hoarder*

          I did the same for one of my moves! The building porter saved all the paper boxes for me. They’re a good size – not too big, not too small, and pretty sturdy because paper reams are heavy.

      2. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

        I also have flattened boxes saved in anticipation of future moves. It doesn’t seem to matter that I’ve now been in my current (purchased) home for 9 years, retired 2 years ago, and planted fruit trees to establish myself as permanent.

  260. Hydrangea McDuff*

    Paper clips. We just moved our offices from a 125-year old building to a brand new construction, and we went from every department having their own storage cabinets for supplies to a shared supply situation. When we collected and pooled the supplies, we definitely had enough boxes of paper clips to get us through until the apocalypse.

  261. nonprofit llama groomer*

    I just transferred from one branch office to another branch office. The old branch had 2 typewriters because the branch manager used typewriters for forms. We had a typewriter repair guy come to the office every few months to make sure the typewriters still worked.

    Despite the fact that every other branch of the organization used virtual faxes, the manager negotiated for a real live fax machine with a dedicated phone line and encouraged employees to use the fax machine instead of the virtual fax number once we were back in the office post-COVID.

    I’m not young and grew up with land line phones and college computer labs to write papers because most people couldn’t afford PCs/Old school Macintosh computers, but this was ridiculous! It is so much easier to work in the new branch!

  263. pagooey*

    I work for a very large corporation whose struggles with RTO policy have been well-documented in the media. The elevators in many campus buildings are equipped with whiteboards, so that employees can jot down greetings or silly polls during a quick trip between floors. (Think: home sportsballers rule! + outcry from visiting sportsballer team fans, etc.)

    When employees were blanket-compelled to return to campus, often under extremely difficult circumstances, the amount of RTO-related graffiti on the whiteboards noticeably increased. We’re not talking manifestos here. Just the amount of griping or #union mumbling one might conceivably scrawl during an elevator ride, watched by security cameras the entire time. The powers that be couldn’t remove all the whiteboards…so someone took all the dry-erase markers instead. Boxes of them still lived in the supply rooms on every floor, though…so a rapid cycle of pen confiscation and replenishment has ensued.

  264. Amorette Allison*

    I’m in charge of bulk ordering at the high school where I work. Binder clips in all sizes, PENCILS and notebook paper are the big items. Also index cards and staplers. Schools have NOT gone paperless. Half of the kids arrive in class with neither pencil nor paper so we go through it by the bucket load. Now if I could just get rid of those big brown envelopes from COVID, I would be happy.

  265. Distractable Golem*

    No thumbtacks or adhesives were allowed on the walls, only blue tape. Our school administrator would label the inside of her role of tape and wear it as a bracelet. I still have one I stole from her…I keep it as a good luck charm.

  266. Cease and D6*

    I used to work in an academic department that had landlines on every desk. The landlines were costing the department hundreds of dollars per year to maintain. Nobody at the department had ever heard one of these landlines ring.

  267. Caramellow*

    Way at the end…but I had a manager who claimed total ownership of a certain brand of pen. If you got one at a conference you were expected to give it to her. If you decided to keep it, it would go missing from your desk. Even if you bought your own, it wasn’t allowed.

    1. MagicEyes*

      I’m curious–what brand of pen inspires this kind of loyalty? Did a pen save your manager’s life?

      1. Caramellow*

        BIC Gelocity but only in black. To this day when I use one it’s a moral victory! :)

  268. Mark*

    When we moved office I threw out the massive multipage stapler because it is never used any more. A couple of months later I pass the supply press and there is a brand new massive stapler. Mabel, the office stalwart has requested it as our other one got lost in the move. Sigh

  269. Ettalynn*

    At a previous job, we had a vendor who would occasionally bring in a rubber-band-wrapped bundle (think; a dozen or so) gel pens with their branding on them, and give them to my boss. These pens were highly prized and were sparingly doled out as marks of favor, or recognition of a job well done.

  270. Comb-Bound*

    We have a comb binder in our admin office. No one has used it since the last time I comb-bound a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons modules, in approximately 2018. (I do not, in fact, work for a Dungeons and Dragons-related company.) There is no rational reason to keep it, but there’s something neat about having it, and it’s not like we’ll ever be able to get another one if we ditch this one.

  271. MagicEyes*

    The only thing in my office that I guard with my life is my paper cutter. We have a shared cheapie paper cutter that people like to borrow. They always promise to bring it back, but they never do, so I have to go around the building to find it and bring it back. I got a much better quality paper cutter (precise marks! self sharpening! <B) However, it's heavy. I draw the line at carrying it around the building, so I don't lend it out to anybody. Even though it lives on a narrow shelf in my office where you can't even see it, somehow people still find out about it and want to borrow it. That's a big nope from me.

  272. Azure Jane Lunatic*

    Oh man. So I was going through the various supply closets in an attempt to inventory everything, and happened upon a stash of sealed coffee packets, sized for the big machines with the huge urns. They were left over from when the office actually had those (they had switched to an individual pod system years before). They were super, super expired.

    I couldn’t bring myself to just dump them in the landfill trash, so for the better part of a week my spare time occupation was slashing the packets open and dumping the loose coffee into the compost bin.

  273. Dragonfly7*

    I personally hoard Ticonderoga pencils despite never using them (they’re the “good pencils,” and my mother always bought the cheapest ones with terrible erasers), and I would refuse to part with any mountable hand crank pencil sharpener because the little plastic personal ones disappear nearly as fast as scissors.

  274. Sally Forth*

    I worked for an office supplies company in a city with a lot of oil and gas companies. Someone in our office worked with his client to develop an amazing combo of pressboard accordion folder with coloured pressboard internal dividers punched with Acco fasteners. We would order them custom done by the hundreds. I loved those folders.

  275. SnooPoems1106*

    Dry erase markers that actually work seem to be impossible to keep. And why are regular markers even a thing? I throw them away constantly since they’re half dead and will damage the dry erase boards. They serve no purpose, and are just there due to someone ordering incompetence.

    For construction projects, hard hats walk. It’s aggravating. You need this every day and yet you don’t have one? Our budget for hard hats was ridiculous until I purchased pink hard hats for loaning out. Suddenly, everyone remembered their hard hats.

  276. Leslie*

    Staples. For a long time, our office refused to buy adequate staples, and I had to beg and borrow them. I finally got a very large box of staples. Six months later, we went to a computerized system. That was over a decade ago, and I’ve barely touched my staples, but no way I’m giving them up.

  277. SpiritedArachnid*

    This big, old-fashioned, three-hole punch.

    Inter-departmental wars were fought over this old, clunky three-hole punch, even though our printers always have a tray with three-hole paper in it. It was like a bizarre game of catch-the-flag.

    After victories, defeats and betrayals, my department finally won the war. One night during overtime where we had to rebuild a server, we snuck into enemy territory (Finance) and claimed it. Wails of frustration were heard the next day and we gloated. Serves them right for not approving our requested budget that year.

    That silly thing now sits atop one of our servers in the server room, safely protected by security passes.

    I am only barely exaggerating. It was ridiculous.

  278. BikeWalkBarb*

    I love all the stories about not being able to throw out old items purchased a long time ago, being kept “just in case” or because someone thinks it’s wasteful to get rid of them. Hello, you expensed that stuff a long time ago and it’s not going to affect this year’s profit/loss or balance sheet.

    Twice now I’ve worked in an office that had been occupied a long time and had to be completely vacated. Some of the items kept that finally got tossed in one move or the other because someone realized there was no point to box them up and move them (but not all of these got tossed):

    – Bunches of the plastic sliding strips that hold a plastic cover on a report, in various colors and widths

    – Preprinted forms of various types, like the pink phone message pads that would only be relevant if you had someone who answered your phone when you weren’t available

    – Really old dried-out rubber bands that broke if you tried to use them

    – Large collections of crappy pens with vendor logos on them (If you’re the person who buys the stuff for conference please stop buying pens because we already have our favorites and yours will not match our exacting specifications. Give us treats instead, or a cloth for cleaning our glasses and computer screens.)

    – Everything to do with filing things in hanging folders (two different sizes because why would we all have a common size or system?): the hanging folders, the plastic tabs in various colors to put on the hanging folder to identify contents, a variety of file folders

    – Pocket portfolios for holding All The Important Stuff For This One And Only Meeting because you couldn’t just set the papers neatly on the table, oh no, and all of these had the printed labels stuck onto them from some specific meeting so they had clearly been picked back up after the meetings and held for reuse at a future meeting but that didn’t happen because who would want to give people a recycled folder with the old label peeking out from underneath the new one? But let’s keep them because in our minds we’re very thrifty and being responsible with resources.

    – Did I mention the pens? So. Many. Pens. So many dried-out pens, if you wanted to take the time to test them and decide whether they were even worth keeping. Whoever’s putting the dried-out pens back in the pen-storage location, stop that.

  279. Capt. Dunkirk*

    In my last job, we had a regular need for boxcutters and people were protective over them because – like pens – they would very often be borrowed once and then never seen again.

    I had a wheeled cart in my area that I used every day. I decided to take some strong wire and tether my boxcutter to that cart. Not only did I always know where it was, but it could still sort of be borrowed by people… as long as they were willing to move the whole cart to where they needed it.

    I kept the same boxcutter for 8+ years and was still tied to the cart when I left.

  280. Capt. Dunkirk*

    In kind of an inverse of what the post is asking for, I used to work somewhere that procured branded merchandise, including pens.

    One of our biggest customers folded as a business but we still had tens of thousands of their branded pens stored in our warehouse which hadn’t been (and never would be) paid for.

    That stockpile of pens became our defacto standard in-office pens and no one was ever protective over them because they were *everywhere*.

    Full, unopened packs would lay around untouched in various areas for months or sometimes years because the pens were so abundant around the office.

  281. Pixel*

    Punch cards. I worked at the intake desk of the central helpdesk for a major university after college. There was an entire storage room full of punch cards. This was in 1993, there wasn’t even a card punch in the building anymore. We used them as note cards. I used a mechanical pencil because that was the only way I could keep a writing implement because our boss would walk off with pens. On Fridays she would bring the contents of her pen cup back to our desk.

  282. Elizabeth West*

    I missed this yesterday because I was out, but OldExJob was the last job I had that wasn’t almost or completely paperless. ExJob did stock some things, and we have a few supplies at NewJob, but most of that work was/is done electronically.

    The main thing I can remember from OldExJob was that people would nick my stapler ALL THE TIME. I would have to call out “Who has my stapler?” or go hunt it down on the desks. This despite the fact that there were numerous staplers in the office supply closet for the taking, and almost everyone had one on their desk. Nope, if they were in the vicinity of my desk, they would borrow mine and walk off with it. These were all male coworkers, by the way.

    I got tired of it so I ordered a bright coral pink-colored X-Acto stapler and stuck a label on it that had a picture of Milton from Office Space next to the word “MINE!” in capital letters. Mysteriously, it stayed on my desk after that.

  283. tiny potato*

    Those of us who watch Taskmaster know that the king of the office supplies is the LAMINATOR!

  284. I'm just here for the cats!*

    getting to this late.
    a hole punch. specifically one of those big 3 ring punches that have the lever you push down on. Part of it snapped off years before I started. it still works but you have to be careful how the pages go in or else it punches wrong. I finally was able to get another one, same type and everything, but someone salvaged it.

    Also we have those large paper cutters that don’t cut straight. Apparently their is a “trick” to it but I never could figure it out.

  285. mgguy*

    One of my far too many hobbies is collecting fountain pens.

    Yes I have some pricey ones, but also some cheapies. If you’re interested I’ll open my office drawer and out comes a brand new $5 Platinum Preppy that’s yours to keep.

    If you want to write with the pen in my pocket that day, maybe I’ll let you if you’ve shown yourself trustworthy, but I still keep the cap in my hand for two reasons. The first is I don’t want you jamming it on the back of the pen(especially if it’s not a pen meant to do that), but the second is that no one is going to get light fingered with a pen that’s going to bleed out all over your pocket.

    Almost every day, I have a Montblanc 149 in EF inked. It’s a decently stiff nib and is pretty easy to write with(Montblanc EF grinds are a bit tricky to write with-one of the reasons why most retailers only stock F and M for walk-in customers) but I still have watched in pain as people pushed hard or did other crazy things to try and get it to write. If I’m writing with a stub, oblique, or even a bit soft(and I have a fair few pens that check all three boxes) you need to be a good friend and probably someone who writes with fountain pens yourself to for me to trust you with it. If it’s an old superflex Waterman or some of my real special prizes like my Parker Oversize Vacumatic with a near wet noodle(XXF with no pressure, but will open up to about a triple broad with even a fairly light touch), well I’m not sure I’ve ever let someone else write with that one…

  286. Tree*

    There was a period of time where the company was on a mission to reduce hand injuries. good!

    One part of this was by removing all knives, razors, hammers, etc. Problem. Because in the QA lab we needed to take a lot of cuts of rubber parts. And in the rubber mixing lab they needed to use small machete sized knives as the least dangerous part of the process.

    Certain big bosses didn’t want to apply for exceptions to this rule, so we were hoarding anything sharp for a year or so until they figured out how to let us have our necessary blades.

  287. Take The Pen, Leave the Cannoli*

    Hi, long time reader, first time commenter.

    When I still worked in an office, the company didn’t provide supplies other than yellow legal pads and pencils. Most of us bought our own supplies and then the death match was ON. I really liked the Pentel RSVP pens, they wrote very smoothly on most paper types. Then I discovered the Red n Black notebooks at Staples and it was true love. You could pry my Pentel RSVP pen and my Red n Black out of my cold dead hands.

    One day my department got a new admin, we didn’t even know we were supposed to have an admin. This blessed lady sent us all the COS catalog and told us to pick out whatever we wanted as long as it stayed under the amount that would trigger an approval process.

    Now I work from home and I have to contend with my teenagers stealing my pens and my post it notes and my husband taking my notebooks. So aggravating.

  288. ASneakierMailman*

    I worked in technical services at a small public library. I very much needed my supplies (special pens and markers were necessary for my job and no one else’s, special scissors, etc.). I kept track of them well because they were essential to my job. Unfortunately, because I managed my things well, literally everyone else in the building would think “Oh, where’d my pen go? Well, no worries, ASneakerMailman’s always got one at her desk.” or “Oh, I didn’t cap the Sharpie and it dried out. I’ll just get another from ASneakierMailman’s desk” My desk became the supply closet in everyone’s mind and I never had anything when I needed it.

    I started keeping everything in a special zippered pouch which I would hide during the day, and keep in my car’s glove box when I left every night. People laughed at me but it ensured I could do my job with my supplies without going on some weird scavenger hunt every time.

  289. Introvert Teacher*

    I worked in a school with an older administrative assistant we’ll call Gertrude. She always made a fuss any time teachers requested supplies and made it very difficult to order needed items. One summer break, the new principal discovered the stash of supplies Gertrude had been hoarding in a dark corner of the school for years. He hauled every single item out and spread everything all over the stage, announcing to teachers on their first week back that everything was up for grabs. Among the stacks of notebooks, paper, binders, index cards, tape, chart paper and pens were boxes of floppy disks and binding combs for making spiral bound books (popular to do at least 20 years ago), as well as other obsolete items that just all went to waste from a misguided sense of frugality.

  290. Lurking Worker*

    Somewhere in the early aughts, a purchasing manager started working for us. His first decree upon arrival was that no one ever buy paper clips again. Which, in retrospect: fair. His second decree was that his new employees scatter throughout the building and collect the office supplies that everyone was hoarding and bring them back to his department for central storage.
    I faced down a very sweet woman who still works for us on this front. I had a box of supplies that I felt were idiosyncratic to my needs: THESE rubber bands; THESE binder clips in THIS size; THIS White-Out, in THIS form factor, and so forth. I was adamant. I held my ground. I was victorious.
    Well, we eventually moved offices and I took that very box of office supplies to my new office at the new building. Containing many of the exact same supplies that were sitting in that box when I fought to keep them, languishing unused for going on 20 years now.
    I am not the hero of this story.

  291. Pink Geek*

    This is not quite that this thread is about but thinking about holy relic office supplies reminds me of My Pen.

    It’s not a particularly remarkable pen, it’s maybe a half step up in quality from those ubiquitous Papermate blue pens. It came home with me from OldOldJob by accident and I put it in my purse to take it back and… 15 years later it is still in my purse. I have replaced the ink in it several times and migrated it forward to new purses. I lose all kinds of things but for some reason this pen has stuck with me.

  292. Anniewiththegrayhair*

    The good pens and the good notebooks. People would hoard these Pentel Energel pens all the time, and in weird specific colours like purple, teal or pink.
    We weren’t allowed to write in our good notebooks in these colours so it was baffling as to why everyone wanted these coloured pens.

    The good notebooks were so “good” that they had to be locked away in a room at the front and we could only use black or blue pen to write in them with only yellow highlighter.

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