Early on in my career I discovered the power of Bic pens.
Around the age of 10 my mother had been doing a lot of her shopping at Big Lots. She would always come home with a thousand things loaded in the trunk of her car and I would have to spend 10 minutes or so loading those things back into the house. She never really bought things based on need. She focused instead on whether or not something was on sale. So one day, she came home with a box full of Bic round stick grip ball point pens (try saying that 5 times really fast).
If you've read the intro post to this blog then I think you have an idea as to where this is going.
I was in the 6th grade at the time. I was in a new school, significantly larger than my old one, and I had none of my elementary school friends with me (my mother had me transferred to a school closer to our house).
I was in a foreign environment, alone and afraid,and within the first two weeks of school I had come face to face with a serious problem.
HORNETS!!!
Yup, the bane of my middle school existence consisted of a piece of paper and a rubber band.
not very scary?
Here let me show you why I hated them so much, compare these two images
Now compare these two images
oh wait there is only one photo. Good, I only need one photo. Both the paper hornet and the insect hornet result in pain. It's just that middle school boys are far more malicious than insect hornets are and i spent a lot of my middle school life peeking at a mirror from over my shoulder to count the welts on my back.
So what could middle school me do about it? I was getting tired of being shot in the back and sitting in the back so that no one was behind you simply meant that people would turn around and shoot you in the face. After having received a hundred or so welts from the generous paper recyclers of my school, I decided to take action. I took one of my many Bic pens, took it apart, and constructed a weapon of superior destructive power to smash my foes into the dust from whence they came.
The design for which lies below.
For a few days after I had created this I would shoot anyone who dared to attempt to welt me. The ink cartridges had a bad habit of exploding when they hit something. Needless to say, after several ruined shirts and some broken skin, people made sure that their hornets were aimed away from my general vicinity.
Um...don't shoot me bro?
ReplyDeleteAlso, is the snake shooter you showed me earlier?
Nope! and SHHHHH thats for a later post
DeleteDramatic story! In addition to providing the design of the pen-shooter, perhaps give a brief description of how it works in a paragraph right after the diagram.
ReplyDeleteI knew this was you Daniel the second I started reading about the pens and the hornets! I can imagine, from personal experience, why those middle schoolers left you alone after you shot them with your deconstructed pens! (Of course, you've never shot it at me. You're way to nice for that. But I remember once you were testing some other weapon of yours and wanting me to hold a piece of paper up that you could shoot it through. It went right through it with so much force! I was so intimidated!) Anyway, good, entertaining post!...Are you considering being an inventor when you grow up? :)
ReplyDeleteGrace Anastasio
lol perhaps, I'm not so sure that would be my line of work though :).
DeleteYikes... seems like your middle school was a bit laissez-faire when it came to kids attacking each other. At least you were acting in self-defense, and had a much more creative device. I had a rather sheltered middle school experience, and the only projectile-launching device I made was for a science project (though I must say it was rather impressive; constructed from legos and a rubber band and could launch a small message capsule fifty feet or so).
ReplyDeleteWhat middle school were you at that allowed students to fire hornets and Bic pens at each other? I'm pretty sure that qualifies as a "weapon", and at some schools you might have set off a Code Red.
ReplyDeletelol the kids were ninja!, whenever the teacher turned around, FWIP! FWIP! FWIP!
DeleteWow, had I know about this, I would've saved all those cheap pens that somehow magically ran out of ink even though you could clearly see the ink through the cartridge thingy. Very clever design, and I must say the middle school you went to makes the middle school that I attended look tame. I think the worst thing that happened in class was people throwing water bottles at other people's heads, and usually they weren't as ninja about it.
ReplyDelete