It all started in February. I don’t remember the date. I just know it was at least a month ago. A bunch of the student resource centers were having an open house in the Homewood Apartments lobby. This is where I live.
They set it up so you had to walk through the tables and say hello to representatives from the Office of LGBTQ+ Life, the Office of Multicultural Affairs and a few other ones that also have acronyms we’re slightly familiar with. They were giving out cookies, flyers and other little freebies. I wasn’t going to take anything because I was in a little bit of a hurry to get up to my room so I could go lie in bed for the rest of the day. But then I saw it.
A rainbow pen. Not just a regular black-inked pen in a rainbow shell. No. This pen had rainbow ink. Color-changing ink. You start out pink and then *bam* you’re writing in purple. I needed this pen in my life desperately.
As a double-major in Writing Seminars and Mathematics, I do a lot of writing. I write stories that no one will ever see. I write out math problems on scratch paper before transcribing them neatly into my homework. Trust me I could use a rainbow pen.
I reached out to grab it off of the LGBTQ+ Life table, but the representative guarding these pens stopped me.
“You need to sign up for our mailing list before you can have one,” she said.
“I’m already on the mailing list,” I said. This was not a thoughtful lie to avoid paying my dues for this pen. I am actually on the mailing list.
So she told me to go tell my friends to subscribe to the mailing list, and I nodded along with her and took the pen. Mission accomplished.
I loved that pen. I used that pen to write anything that wasn’t going to be seen by a professor. I took notes with it. I annotated stories with it.
I worked out math problems with it.
I quickly ran through all the colors: Pink to blue to purple, kind of skipped over the yellow, to orange to sort of greenish. And that was the end. No more rainbow pen.
So naturally I turned to the Internet to buy as many rainbow pens as I could. There was absolutely no way that I was going back to boring single-color pens. I found an excellent deal on LightintheBox.com — six rainbow pens for 89 cents. Shipping was 10-20 business days, but it would only cost me four cents. I ordered three of these. 18 pens in total for less than four dollars.
Over the course of the next month I agonized over these pens. What if they came over spring break? What if they didn’t come until the end of April and I didn’t get to use them for school? What if, what if, what if? I measured time in how long I’d been waiting for these pens. How many weeks left in the semester? Approximately two pen cycles.
Finally on Monday, March 21, the pens arrived. I retrieved my package from the Charles Commons Mailroom, and it was suspiciously small. It was about the length and width of a generic envelope for letters. I felt around and it seemed like there were only three pens inside. Oh no.
I took it home, opened it and my worst fears were realized. There were only three pens. Not 18. Three. I thought the company had made a
mistake. They messed up my order. I went to the website to try to find a place to complain to.
Instead I found the true problem. The name of the product was “Six Colored Pens.” Being the rational person I am, I assumed that meant I would get six pens in each order, adding up to 18 total. Now I saw that it meant I would get one pen with six colors. I was not getting the tremendous deal I thought I was.
But it wasn’t entirely my fault. The picture on the product page had six pens in it. The wording was deliberately confusing. They were trying to trick me. And now I am sad with 15 fewer pens than I want.
That’s it. That’s the end of the story. The moral is not to trust anyone ever because they will just destroy your hopes and dreams and provide you with 15 fewer pens than you were expecting. Be careful, my friends.
