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I'm pretty sure there's some sort of global conspiracy by the people who make and sell pens. That's right, pens. I base this on a few things I've observed over the years.
1. People rarely actually retain the services of a pen all the way until it runs out of ink. I think I've personally accomplished this feat like 3 or 4 times in my life, and think of how many pens I've used!
2. People rarely throw away pens that are not out of ink...even most teachers who find lots of pens on the floor of their classroom usually keep them around as extras.
3. People are constantly running out of pens. They disappear from desks, they're never in women's purses when they need one, and God help the poor waiters at restaurants who are always scrounging for a pen so their customer can sign the credit card slip.
4. People are constantly buying new pens.
Logically, these facts together would mean that the world should be overcome with pens. People are constantly buying new pens, and yet the old ones are never thrown away...they're usually just "lost". But when these pens are "lost", doesn't someone find them? (unless there's some sort of phenomenon similar to how washing machines cause socks to disappear into oblivion) And by the statements stated earlier, these pens would then be recycled and used some more until the new person eventually lost track of it. The Pen Life Cycle continues on and on.
It's all kind of like that law in physics where matter is never created or destroyed...it just changes form. In theory, pens would just change ownership. With the constant inflow of pens into our world and a very small outflow of pens that run out of ink or are thrown away, we should have pens coming out of our ears. According to my rough calculations, there should be enough pens on the planet for every man, woman, and child on earth to have 89.45 pens.
But this is obviously not the case. As stated earlier, pens constantly disppear, and no one ever has one when they need it. This leads us to only one conclusion: the pen companies have a secret network through which they steal pens, clean them, refill the ink, and resell them. Perhaps they secretly hire one guy in each major company who sneaks around at night and takes pens. Perhaps his disguise is as a cleaning guy. Perhaps his name is Chuck. The certainty is that no one can be trusted.
One thing is clear: we as Americans, and even as humans cannot tolerate this any more. Millions of innocent men and women and faceless corporations are being gouged by a heartless industry whose only care is the bottom line. The madness must stop. Join me in the revolution!