Seven minutes and 24 seconds left in class, and with every tick on the clock, the tip of your pencil lead sheds and wears until it is rounder than a monk’s head, and your letters are each thicker than an Egyptian’s eyeliner. Still battling through Ms. Czarnecki’s 11th essay question, you cannot tolerate the pencil’s suffocating dullness for a second longer. You dart for the sharpener and plunge the pencil into the slightly ominous black hole, and immediately, a deafening cacophony bursts forth to give everyone in the classroom a second degree eardrum rupture. You then yank the pencil away, satisfied with its enchanting sharpness, and return to your test. As soon as you resume your work, lo and behold! The lead tip slides right out of the wood, leaving behind a cavity that can only be filled by your anguish and wrath.
The above paragraph is a way-too-long yet vivid description of an encounter with a bad pencil sharpener, which, tragically, is an inevitable presence that ever haunts our lives. This experience may not apply to pen users as much, but we all have used pencils in the past, and most of us have crossed paths with some disgracefully bad sharpeners. There are two general types of pencil sharpeners: electric and manual. The former is highly preferable except when the above scenario occurs, but the latter is the main villain in my nightmares.
There are many subspecies under the manual category, and they all have something I abhor. Often inhabiting the wall, the ones that you can simply insert the pencil and hand crank to sharpen are handy and easy to use, until they start snowing sawdust and graphite bits onto the ground because no one ever cleans them out. In fact, due to poor maintenance, this kind of pencil sharpener experiences issues like the hand crank getting stuck, one side of the pencil getting sharpened way more than the other or the wood cracking into two pieces.
What is even worse is this species’ cousin, the kind with the pencil holder that needs to be pulled out and snaps back when you are through. The metal part that stabilizes the pencil always leaves a nasty tooth mark, and you cannot be unaware of this snapping turtle’s hungry gaze as your tender flesh comes within millimeters of its jaw. But even this cannot equal the most diabolical of them all, the small yet spiteful creatures tugged away in little children’s backpacks. These parasites lurk in candy bowls every Halloween night, waiting for a new host. Composed only of a blade and hard plastic, those pocket-sized pencil sharpeners hide their vile nature under their friendly camouflage, working perfectly the first time they are used. But way too often in my younger years have I fallen for the bait, trusting that such a sharpener would take care of my favorite pencil wrapped in Star Wars cartoon design, when the silent killer strikes, sinking its fangs into the wood and tearing Chewbacca’s face into shreds of plastic. Mere seconds later, I was left with a pencil sharpener that never worked properly again and a bare, broken pencil that was stripped of its coat.
Pencil sharpeners are like peaches: the good are good, but the bad are rotten.
