pencils sharpened on both ends

yesterday i was typically bored and i wondered about the world around me. not the world at large, but my immediate, physical surroundings. which happens to be the office now, since i am with ops int and i am excused outfield so i try to spend time seasoning the plush office chairs instead of their counterparts in the mess. so in the office there is a whole row of metal cupboards, a third of which belonging to ops int, so i had to find out what was inside some of them.

i proceeded to open the keypress to draw out the keys. well, this is iti, so only 2 or 3 of the 50 keyhooks in the keypress are in use, because the cupboard keys, abloy keys and internal doorkeys were mostly collected on a single keyring. we call it the master bunch (0f) key(s), because with this bunch half the doors in 2 different blocks in and 20% of all camp cupboards can be opened. bearing in mind that this is iti, the keys are all not labled.

so i spend almost 1 hour trying out keys and opening cupboards. there were many cupboards and many keys. it was annoying, but i had to kill time. the spirit of adventure and discovery was strong in me, and i staunchly believed that i was going to find something good among the stacks of papers bearing testament of lousy english lessons, random stationery, parts of cannibalized field chairs and sbo parts.

i did. i found a mechanical pencil sharpener. that was made in japan. how cool is that. i was quite amused by it, by how it was so damned heavy, by how it contained 4 batteries to power 2 tamiya-like engines. i postulate, hopefully quite accurately, that one engine allows the screwblade to rotate around it own axis while the other engine drives a chain that allows the screwblade to rotate around the pencil shaft which itself also rotates. and it comes with a safety mechanism that kills the power when the shaving collection bin is removed. and a manual that was completely in japanese with no illustration.

the sharpener automatically sharpened anything pushed through its vulva, for the lack of a better name. and it did so with a satisfyingly loud whirr that attracted the attention of mes chers collegues pretending to do work in the labyrinth of cubicles. it didnt sharpen very well, but within seconds every other bored guy seemed to have with him a pencil, or two or three of them, that needed sharpening. so i let them all sharpen their pencils. and i realized that the resultant shavings are quite pretty.

the sharpener, for want of a better expression, became 'my precious' and i decided that i had shared my precious enough, so i retired with it someplace else to sharpen a pencil. the sharpener made a lot of noise but didnt sharpen very well, so i had to think of what i can do to achieve the best result.

i tried to engage it at different angles, but with varying success. in the process i made an important discovery that sharpening pencils at both ends was the domain of the demented bored dude or dudette, not the nerd with a transformer pencil case with purpose built eraser compartment that springs out, or humji-kia whose pencil lead will definitely break during model-drawing. do not spit on this discovery. it seems blatantly obvious but only because it has been discovered. its just like gravity. it took more than 100 000 years post-monkeydays before a specimen of humankind discovered it. it is good to be bored sometimes, so that one can try out new things and make great discoveries that might one day make the world a better place for the entire human race.

anyway i discovered that the best result was achieved by providing a good strong downward force that continuously fed the pencil to the depths of the hole. to prevent the graphite shavings from sticking on the wood, the sharpener should be shaked before the pencil is gently removed. the lack of force will result in a blunt pencil head. excess force on the other hand creates the made-in-china toy helicopter problem. helicopters often have a little propeller on its rear tip to keep the copter in the right direction, but the chinese helicopter would have a hind propeller tht is stronger than needed so the helicopter spins round and round. similarly the sharpener spins around itself and soon enough half the pencil has been shaved away.

which isnt a bad thing, really. because the pencil shavings look quite cool. it is quite amusing to look at the shavings getting spewed out. as the bin gets congested some of it feeds back into the screwblade and gets spewed out in a really funny way. i know its not just funny to me because some people who gathered around to watch the sharpener were mesmerized by the rhythmic spewing of the shavings. at some point i had taken out a box of fresh pencils and when i took a toilet break necessary to prevent stones from forming, the other dudes managed to lay their hands on my precious and created, within about half an hour, pencilettes from the pencils. and of course, lots and lots of shavings which got dumped down the shirt of some poor guy who was not involved in the original fun.

everything stopped when it was time to bookout. i locked the sharpener away for the day.

there is a fine line between curiousity and lunacy and between fun and idiocy. over here where i am squatting to my ord, this line is really, really fine.