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I Believe You Have My Stapler 583

yack0 writes "After three years of demand and countless calls, emails and letters, you can finally buy a Red Swingline Stapler. Hooray! As noted in this wall street journal article and confirmed by this page at the Swingline Stapler web site you can now pick up a Red Swingline stapler for merely twice the price of a plain black stapler. However, a colleague of mine says that the online order form is reading around $16 for his right now. Now all the cubicle dwelling prairie dogs can get one step closer to burning down the building." The red stapler has become some sort of cult icon at this point.
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I Believe You Have My Stapler

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  • by scaramush ( 472955 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:56PM (#3862254) Homepage Journal
    According to IMDB [imdb.com] the original stapler was just painted anyways:

    The red Swingline stapler that Milton was so afraid of having taken away was never actually manufactured by the Swingline company; it was instead painted red by a crew member in the props department. However, following the movie's success on video as a cult film, the demand for red Swingline staplers (apparently as a symbol of quiet rebellion among cubicle-bound employees) was so great that the company began to sell the red Swingline stapler on its website..

    ---

    So break out that red paint and make your own... ;)

  • by PDG ( 100516 ) <pdg@webcrush.com> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @12:02AM (#3862290) Homepage
    Actually, Milton and the epic of the stapler didn't originate in 'Office Space' but rather Judge's cartoon short from MTV's Liquid Television progam.

    The skit basically showed Lumbherg and Milton having their classic confrontation about the stapler, moving his office down to the basement, and what not.

    Judge made 'Office Space' from this skit.
  • by mr_gerbik ( 122036 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @12:32AM (#3862425)
    Wow, thats really interesting considering "There was just a slight problem: Swingline didn't make bright-red staplers." (wsj)

    Nice try at impressing us loser.

    Next time try sticking a that flaming stapler up your ass.
  • Re:Ahhh Office Space (Score:4, Informative)

    by laserjet ( 170008 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @12:48AM (#3862480) Homepage
    You are slightly incorrect.

    You have it backwards.

    To be specific, it breaks down like this:

    PC (Paper Cassette) Load Letter (Size paper).

    This happens when you send a print job that requires Letter size paper, but the printer does not, or thinks it does not, have letter size paper.

    This can be cause by having the wrong paper size in the printer, but is more commonly caused by those who insert the paper tray guides incorrectly. Many people mistakenly insert the tray guide for letter size paper in the A4 (our European friend's letter-size equivalent) slots, because they are close in size.

    This causes a different sensor arm to be tripped, and the printer thinks it has A4 size when it actually is letter.

    This is what can cause this error message. Either that, the wrong size of paper, or a broken sensor.

  • by schussat ( 33312 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @01:04AM (#3862531) Journal
    Actually, Milton and the epic of the stapler didn't originate in 'Office Space' but rather Judge's cartoon short from MTV's Liquid Television progam.

    I'm pretty sure that what preceded Liquid Television was Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation -- they were showing Milton clips several years before MTV, I think. Short Milton clips would appear between longer animated shorts. (BTW, those old Animation Festival films were absolutely fantastic; I'll never forget some of the animations they screened.)

    -schussat

  • by Skyshadow ( 508 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @01:21AM (#3862568) Homepage
    Amen.

    I was one of three westerners in a Chinese office (as in, moved-from-Beijing-a-year-before) for just short of a year, and the place burned me out faster and more completely than I thought possible.

    Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever put in less than a twelve hour day, six or seven days a week. Even when there was no deadline, you were expected to be there. What was really happening was that nobody was really *working* that much, they'd just all adapted their lives around work -- they'd take long lunches and dinners, play at least an hour of ping-pong a day, have their kids would come visit at night, etc.

    As an native American (although only a fraction Native American) with (IMO) a pretty solid work ethic, I looked terrible if I left "early" or said I couldn't come in on a Sunday for whatever reason. My boss called me on it one time, and I pointed out that I *always* met my deadlines and that I applied myself at work more than any of my coworkers. From his reaction, it was clear that wasn't the point -- I wasn't showing the proper dedication, defined strictly as spending time at work.

    Anyhow, I got laid off last year after I told them I was going home to the midwest for Christmas (during a time with no pressing deadlines and using the company's posted holidays and a weekend). It took me five months to find another decent job, but not for one second did I wish I still worked there.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11, 2002 @01:59AM (#3862683)
    If you liked Office Space, you should rent Haiku Tunnel. It's a black comedy about a temp worker who goes perm at a law firm and gets his artistic side crushed. Like Office Space, it's a biting parody of modern office life. Unlike Office Space, the good guy doesn't win, but it's still very funny.

  • Re:Ahhh Office Space (Score:2, Informative)

    by scottj ( 7200 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @03:34AM (#3862897) Homepage Journal
    From my experiences with HP printers many years back, this message was caused far more often by simply running out of paper.
  • by Timmeh ( 555676 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @04:56AM (#3863082)

    I couldn't either until I searched for it on the web and found out who's acting in it, then searching for that actor on IMDB and looking for a similar title. The actual name of the movie is Waydowntown (one word!) and IMDB's search engine ain't smart enuf to tell the difference between 'Waydowntown' and 'Way Downtown'.

    linky linky [imdb.com]

  • Roman History (Score:5, Informative)

    by ronfar ( 52216 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @09:30AM (#3863765) Journal
    In Ancient Rome, educated Greeks would often sell themselves into slavery to wealthy Romans. [csun.edu] However, the thing to remember that these slaves were planning to earn their freedom. They weren't planning to stay slaves forever. If the slave managed to earn his (and I mean his) freedom in this case, he would not only be a free man but a Roman citizen and a client of his former owner. This comparison to the H1-B system is not hyperbolie.

    It beat the conditions they had at home in Greece, but it really was slavery.

    Unfortunately, Americans, being very provincial, tend to think only in terms of American style slavery, in which manumission was rare and unexpected. (Oh, and no one was really sure what to do with free slaves, except repatriate them to Africa.)

    For more information on Roman style slavery, try reading the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough.

    The real problem with comparing things to the H1-B system is that there isn't anything exactly like the H1-B system. It somewhat resembles both indentured servitude [pbs.org] and Roman style slavery.

    American style slavery was really more like feudalism, almost no hope of freedom or every raising your social status. [geocities.com]

    Of course, it is difficult to compare the H1-B system to anything else, since it is a modern invention with its own rules and peculiarities. However, to dismiss a comparison with slavery, especially non-American slavery simply reflects a lack of knowledge of the history of the ancient world.

  • by mikethegeek ( 257172 ) <blair@@@NOwcmifm...comSPAM> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @11:21AM (#3864406) Homepage
    http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:DQJxCdKIbukC: www.swingline.com/b2c/whatsnew/NewProducts.jsp+red +swingline&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

    Here is the text:

    "Swingline The Red Stapler

    Ah, the price of fame. Hollywood took one of our staplers - thanks,
    by the way - and used it in one of their films. Trouble is, they painted it red, a color we didn't offer. Ever since, we've been getting calls from customers demanding to order "that red stapler".

    Okay, okay, you win. We took our industry-leading 747 Desk Stapler and gave it a deep, establishment-defying, I'll- flunt-my-individuality-if-I-choose-to red finish. Without sacrificing one staple's worth of solid 747 reliability.

    The only concession we've made, in fact, is to offer the Red 747 exclusively over the Internet, at least for now. And that's a matter of public safety -
    they're in limited supply, and we'd hate to cause riots in the street."
  • Re:DOD version... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Axe ( 11122 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @12:15PM (#3864790)
    Latest S300 radar sees f117 clear as day and b2 almost as well. It gets enough reflection off the turbulent air - and modern filtering algorithms are much smarter then analog cut-off used in earlier systems (like the ones Iraq and friends have deployed).

    And yeah - it's antenna does not revolve in a circle - it is a phased grid array. It does not have to move to scan target. It actually delays scanning, when it has aquired a target - a continues to beam in its direction for a while, it turns itself off in the direction of jamming bots.

    I do not think B-2 will try to drop anything over a modern S300 site.. Even some tactical systems can get it.

  • by hex1848 ( 182881 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @12:21PM (#3864832) Homepage
  • Re:I, I, I, I.... (Score:2, Informative)

    by TheAngryArmadillo ( 158896 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @02:31PM (#3865634)
    /me pulls out DVD and turns on Closed Captioning...

    [00:18:35]
    Milton(on phone):'...and I could see the squirrels and they were married.'

    Straight from the source.

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

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