As I have gotten older over the years I have in a lot of regards become less and less picky about brands for some things. However one place where I don’t like to bend is when I’m picking up tools that I’m going to be using a lot.
I’m not just talking about hand tools here either, one of the strangest things that I am picky about is my writing instruments and the keyboards that I work with.
These are items that, at least while working, I will have my hands on all day long in some form. Either taking notes, typing emails, writing documentation, or just doing other stuff keyboards and pens are two of the more important things that I have in my bag.
When given a choice I don’t think I’ve used anything other than a fountian pen for coming up on a couple of decades now, and I’ve bought far too many keyboards trying to find the right one for a full days use.
Thinking about it this even impacts my choice of laptops, either a Thinkpad or a Apple device since they seem to have the best keyboards around for typing.
Even though I consider myself picky about these tools I will use whatever is at hand if I don’t have a choice in the matter. And while someone might look at me writing with a 75$ pen and think that’s crazy there are people out there walking around with pens worth far more than what I’ve spent in their notebooks.
For me it makes sense to pay the premium for something that I’m using every day all day long. I would rather pay once and cry about the price once rather than keep having to replace tools that break or can’t do the job.
This is definitely something that I picked up from my father. He worked as a mechanic for years and if you look through his tool box he had some stuff in there that was completely overkill for someone who was not pulling massive trucks apart daily. For him however the cost of a broken tool meant that a job might not get finished on time leaving a truck out of service. There were some tools in the box that were really cheap – mostly stuff that it looks like he bought it for a single job and then tossed it in the back of his toolbox and forgot about them. You can tell however what was important just by the feel of the tools that were in the box.
I suppose at some point I’ll do some reviews of pens and other tools that I’ve got sitting around, for now however it’s getting to be bedtime and it’s time for some sleep.