Maybe the best place to start is with the new hole puncher I bought for work. She can do dozens of pages at once. She only cost me eight dollars at Office Max, which was much less than I expected to spend. Not only is she better than the new little two hole punchers you get when you order supplies where I work, she's even better then the old two hole punchers which people hoard like gold. I thought I would have to spend much more. I never would have even looked if anyone had known who to call to get my old one oiled.

As you can see I think of my new hole puncher as a she. I'm not sure if I'll show this to my wife, but I assure you we have a wonderful relationship on all levels. It's just that I was caught a little off guard by the oiled sensual feel as I punched through a pile of papers. The label I stuck on her now only says "This hole puncher was stolen from David Weisman, who bought it at Office Max". Of course it hasn't been stolen yet, but it will be too late to write than on the label if it ever walks off my desk while I'm not there. Notice the 'it'. This came well before I thought of naming her Samantha.

You may well be wondering why my hole puncher is worth this bandwidth. Let's talk about government waste instead. If you think there's too much of it, take it from someone who works there - you are absolutely right. The bad news is, cutting the budget won't make it go away. Someone with power to make changes needs to examine the operation from stem to stern. Just think what would happen if someone decided to save money by not buying supplies, and the wasted time contributed to many larger scale wastes which didn't show up on the budget immediately.