I am Jerry, Destroyer of Pens

I don't know what it is. It must be an illness or something. I ought to go to a psychiatrist or something and have it checked out. Here's my dirty little secret: I destroy pens.

Seriously. I don't just mean that I chew on pens - though it's true that I do, hard enough to splinter hard plastic pens or to leave deep tooth marks in soft plastic pens. What I mean by 'destroy' is 'dissect'. If it were pens they dissected and not foetal pigs, I could by now be a famous biologist. There is no pen I can not take apart are reassemble over and over again, as a nervous habit.

A pen always contains some kind of cartridge. Your simple Bic is no more than a cartridge and a shell, with a tiny soft plastic bit stuck in the end that somehow keeps the pen from exploding, and with a pinhole midway down the shell, for no clear reason except to suck in spittle and leave the inside of the pen flecked with drool if you happen to be the kind of person who sticks pens lengthwise in your mouth. A Bic has no screw-like threads on it, though many do - which are good for hours of screwing and unscrewing. It also has no click-mechanism, meaning no tiny little spring. I can't count how many springs I've played with, every now and then accidentally shooting them across the room to the wonderment of whoever I happen to be sharing a room with. Most click-pens will have two plastic doodads that roughly interlock, with a kind of geartooth shape to them. When you've taken the pen apart and are playing with these two bits of plastic, it's tough to really get a sense of how they conspire to create a pen whose nib sticks out of the pen with one click but contracts turtle-like within its shell upon the second click. And yet they do. More reliably than Bill O'Reilly's tides. Never a miscommunication.

Well aware of my ability to torture them at a moment's notice, pens are wary of me, and like a squid cornered in some stretch of ocean will spray their ink all over me - or, at least, all over my pocket. I can't count how many pens have exploded in my pocket over the years.

I'm well aware that my particular stylocidal nervous habit is not exactly a good thing, something I need to rid myself of. But when holding a pen and bored out of one's mind, what else is there to do with a pen?

Best-Before Dates

Do you know what drives me crazy? Best-before dates. Wait a minute: let me explain. There are twelve months in a year and thirty-ish days in a month. Most of the world, and among English-speaking countries this includes the UK, write dates from the smallest unit to the largest. So they say, say, 'the ninth of October, 2011' and write this '9 October 2011'. When restricting themselves to mere numbers, they write it as '09/10/11'. Fair enough. The USA, which tends to stubbornly insist on marching to the beat of its own drum, does not. Instead, it writes dates as 'October 9, 2011', which requires a comma but is no big deal. Different, perhaps less logical, but fair enough provided it's done consistently. And it is. Americans are so proud of the consistency with which they write dates that they celebrate it every Fourth of July... er... well, let's call that one an exception. Anyway, if an American writes '09/10/11', they mean September the 10th. So if an American asks a Brit to meet him at the airport on '09/10/11', there might be a sitcom-worthy one month spent listlessly buying cheap scotch at Heathrow. But domestically neither Brits nor Yanks have a problem. What about us? Well, we in Canada who measure our height in feet but our distances in kilometres, buy liquids in litres but solids in pounds, measure the temperatue outside in Celsius but the temperature of our bodies in Fahrenheit... unsurprisingly, we don't have any idea what we're doing. It's true: if a Canadian writes '09/10/11', you have no chance in hell of knowing what he means unless you ask him. Hell, he could mean October 11, 2009. To that end, a lot of places choose to spell the month out, in whole or in short. So you'll see '9 OCT 11' or 'NOV 10 11' or some such. Or even better, they'll use only two letters, in a bizarre system that attempts to bridge the languages, where most of the months are almost exactly the same and all of them ae at least vaguely similar. It creates the rather horrid "MA", which leaves me wondering every time whether it's March/Mart or May/Mai (it's the latter). Which is a small price to pay for consistency. Except this is not consistent. Not everyone does this. And hey - why did I title this 'best before dates'? Because this problem is most annoying when trying to figure out the runic/hierogylphic logic underpinning the best-before dates on many products. If you can (a) find and (b) decipher the best before date, you might think you're off and running. But there's a good chance it will say something like '09/10/11', with no explanation of how to interpret those numbers. And hey... it's just a minor inconvenience, right? It's not like the end result is potentially getting life-threatening food poisoning from off-code food, right?