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What Do People Say To You When You Whip Out That Pen?


GabrielleDuVent

Common perceptions  

464 members have voted

  1. 1. What do people say to you when you get out your FP?

    • "My, that's a weird looking pen."
      50
    • "That's a cool pen!"
      167
    • "Is that a fountain pen?"
      182
    • "Is that a weapon?"
      12
    • "Can I borrow it?"
      40
    • "Do you use fountain pens? I do too! (goes off into a monologue)"
      19
    • "That's a very posh pen."
      55
    • Other (write them in the posts!)
      97


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When this thread started in 2013, I answered "other" and said that the most common response was for people to show no sign of noticing my pen. I think that's still true. It makes me wonder what things I am not noticing about other people that they expect others to notice. Do they post on, say, the cufflink forum asking how people react to their cufflinks?

 

Most of the comments that I do get are mildly positive or mildly interested. I may get the occasional quizzical look, but I think I've only gotten one negative comment, from a fellow who apparently thought that my use of fountain pens was pretentious.

 

An added thought, a favorite quotation of mine, although I don't know from whom:

 

When I was twenty, I cared what other people thought of me.

 

When I was forty, I no longer cared what other people thought of me.

 

When I was sixty, I realized that people were not thinking about me anyway.

Edited by ISW_Kaputnik

"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

 

- Benjamin Franklin

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I never whip out a pen. One produces them with dignity and grace.

"Don't hurry, don't worry. It's better to be late at the Golden Gate than to arrive in Hell on time."
--Sign in a bar and grill, Ormond Beach, Florida, 1960.

 

 

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Nothing. Nobody cares (more's the pity, What's the point in carrying a 1929 Big Red if no one even says anything about it...)

A lifelong FP user...

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I handed my pen to a student so he could put his name on the unstapled second page of his essay. "I don't know how you write with this thing," he complained. "I don't hold it upside down, that's all," was my reply.

James

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My students all get very intruiged. My wife is tired of hearing about them, lol.

D. Morreale

www.throttleandtorque.com

 

"The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”

- Cormac McCarthy

All The Pretty Horses

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A good chunk of the time nobody even notices. But then again I'm not using the flashiest pen. But when they do, it seems like everyone wants to try writing with it. I just started using again (chuckle) not too long ago, and I've already converted two people!

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I'm an oldie in college. I get a lot of "Cool pen!" from students. Most of them want to know more.

 

I've run into one other FP user on campus, one of the professors who works in the department where I'm a work study.

 

The only derogatory comment I ever got was, why spend so much money on a pen? From a kid wearing $900 Versace jeans. I laughed at the stupidity of spending $900 on a clothing item that wouldn't last more than a few years from occasional wear versus the vintage Sheaffer Triumph I was holding that was already over 50 years old--and still going strong with (at the time) daily use.

Edited by Aquaria
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I work in a career and technical high school (I'm an instructional assistant for two different instructors), and I am often grading student papers. Whenever a student seems me grading their papers with my Safari or my TWSBI 580AL, they always say that it's a weird looking pen.

 

My husband is a teacher, and his students say he's using an old-school pen and couldn't believe it wasn't extremely expensive. He was using a Jinhao 8812 in rosewood that we paid less than $5 on ebay for. :lticaptd:

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(The only time this conversation kept happening was with a non-fountain pen user, and when I had a vintage Montblanc, so it took quite a while for me to explain how expensive it was.)

 

Other person: "Can I write with it?"

 

Me: "I'm sorry, but it's really quite expensive an is worth a lot to me."

 

Other person: "...I'll be careful?" (Alternatively: "How expensive?")

 

Me: "Please, accept that I said no."

 

Other person: "Please?"

 

Me: *starts flipping tables* "NO"

 

Other person: *leaves*

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  • 4 months later...

This evening my husband and I went to vote (it's Primary Day, here in PA -- mostly local races, like mayoral candidates, people on Town Council, and on the school board, and some judgeships, and stuff like that).

When I went to sign in, I pulled out the first pen I got out of the case in my purse. Happened to be a Noodler's Charlie, with Noodler's Heart of Darkness in it (and of course it's less than half full, so it had decided to burp on me earlier in the afternoon).

One of the women at the table (poll officials) started ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the pen and telling me how pretty it was (really? it's a cheap clear plastic eyedropper with a brown marbled cap...). Then she asked me if I wrote POETRY! I said I did some, and told her about having done NaPoWriMo last year and this year. And then after voting, when I was walking out, she called me back and asked about the URL for the NaPoWriMo website.

That was certainly a different response from what I usually get (if at all). Although a lot of my friends now know that I almost always have several fountain pens on me at any given time: "Of *course* Ruth has a pen -- she ALWAYS has a pen...." :rolleyes:

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

"It's very nice, but frankly, when I signed that list for a P-51, what I had in mind was a fountain pen."

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I signed my year-end evaluation with my Nemosine the other day, and my principal said, "I love that you brought your fountain pen. Is that all you ever use?"

D. Morreale

www.throttleandtorque.com

 

"The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”

- Cormac McCarthy

All The Pretty Horses

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Other -

 

"I didn't know they still made those!"

 

And

 

"I had one of those in school!" Said by someone nearly as old as me, in reaction to seeing my Sheaffer school pen.

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I am "Bond -- James Bond."

**************************

"Prune juice -- shaken, not stirred."

LOL

One of my favorite movie lines

And a great comeback

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My girlfriend when I first got my Snorkel, "How much did you pay for that. Stop using that thing out in public it makes you look pretentious.".

 

Now that she's watched me fill it, "That's so cool. Can I use it?"

 

I also had a salesman recognize it, which was a pretty cool experience. As it turned out he had a few fountain pens as well.

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