Profundity

A pen found its way to the desk next to mine. No one calls it their home, the desk next to mine, but people often drop in on it, for work more than pleasure. So when i found the pen there, there wasnt one person i could trace it back to. I asked the most probable suspects, none of them owned up to the pen. I've always wanted to stand t my desk, and yell something out to the whole floor. So machchi market like it'd be! I didnt. Instead, i moved the pen to my desk. Where it lay (and still lays, this one has a happy ending. Or maybe, picture abhi baaki hai.) and occasionally was of use to me.

Now, if you've worked in a software company, you'll be wondering how i can recollect a pen. One pen is pretty much same as the other, and while finding an unexpected pen is always a pleasure, it never sticks around long enough for you to get to know it better. There is almost no place at the workplace where it cant get lost. Desk, conf room, coffee machine, drawer, loo... So, why?

This pen was different. Heavy. Metallic gold, with silver engravings. A _personal_ pen.

Pens do not stay secret for long. If you have one, people around you will come to know of it. And so, this pen too started getting borrowed. What was special about it though, was that it also came back. With startling regularity. Even when i gave it to people saying - i dont know whose it is. After 4-5 such excursions, a theory begun to form in my mind.

What if, this pen's looks are responsible for its coming back? It doesnt look like a typical office pen, so a) people remember who they took it from and b) they feel obliged to return it. It helps, i thought, that it looks expensive. (Only much later did i spy the Pierre Cardin written on it). The pen, its been on more than 15 outings now, and each time, its come back.

If i were a person with that bend of mind, i would write about how 3 such "special" pens could serve a whole floor much more efficiently than regular pens for each person and then maybe come up with a deeper economic theory. But i'm not. So i will simply say this. I might as well have found a cure for common cold.