Mounted on desks in the corner of vision, the office stapler lives a life of intermittent duty. It is heavier than expected, a fact discovered anew each time it is lifted, as if the body forgets between uses. Its jaw opens on a hinge worn smooth by years of thumbs, and its bite, a satisfying compressive clack, remains one of the few unambiguous successes available in an average workday.
It runs empty more often than anyone admits, its magazine hollowed out mid-task, prompting a small, private outage of productivity while a replacement box of staples is located in a drawer three departments away. There are branded staplers, ergonomic staplers, staplers of a lurid corporate red, but the platonic office stapler remains the grey or black rectangle nobody chose, simply inherited from a desk's previous occupant. It asks only paper, in modest quantities, and gives back a clean, permanent join.