Offensive Office Supplies

As several (hundred) of my friends on Facebook have just learned, I have an aversion to colored paper clips. Sometimes a story finds its way to my desk, papers attached together with a pink or red or—God forbid!—patterned paper clip. It irks me. The first thing I do is rip it off and toss it. Throw it away. Blech.

I don't know what the problem is. One look at me, my office decor, or my condo, and you'd think the aversion would be to regular paper clips. The dull silver kind. But I love them. Prefer them. I think my OCD trumps my love of color. I like all the stories to be uniform. No black-sheep paper clips. Or maybe it's because the colored ones are coated in some kind of enamel, making them thicker, and they upset the balance of my paper stacks. I don't know. But I hate them. I don't like the scraping noise/feel that occurs when I pull off a colored paper clip either.

Recently my smart[aleck] friend and coworker Amy learned about my irritation with said office supply and placed a lineup in my chair, complete with four(!) colored paper clips. Wretched. But she did suggest that I save them in a jar on my desk. So that's what I'm doing now, rather than throwing them away. And when my jar is full, I'll happily donate them to…someone. Or something.

It feels lovely to get this off my chest.