Chained pens are found exclusively at counters where a signature is required and trust is not: banks, post offices, DMV windows, and the occasional hotel front desk still operating on 1994 assumptions. Its habitat is a shallow plastic base, screwed down, from which a ball chain, the same gauge used for dog tags and bathroom light pulls, extends eleven to fourteen inches, a length arrived at, this committee presumes, through decades of quiet institutional trial and error regarding how far a customer's arm can plausibly reach before the pen becomes someone else's problem.
The ink is reliably terrible. This committee has tested eleven specimens across six banks and found a common thread: a scratchy first stroke, a skip on the downturn of any capital letter, and a barrel visibly chewed by someone waiting on a loan officer. The cap, when there is one, is invariably lost within the first month of service, leaving the nib to dry out between uses and grow only worse. The chain itself outlives the pen by years, often anchoring nothing but a bare socket where a pen once was, a small monument to theft foiled and object lost anyway. We note, for the record, that the chain has never once been observed to actually prevent a determined customer from leaving with a pen, only to slow them down enough to reconsider whether it was worth it. On this point, we find the design a modest, honest success.