The Stapler

Today at work my boss tasked me with the consequential task of….buying a stapler.

(day in the life of a crop and soil scientist, right)

As Cornell is a large, important, and unwieldy entity, the act of purchasing something using institution or grant money is no straight forward business. But I am authorized to officially deploy lab funds for purchases. So my boss appointed me the stapler (which we did need) as a fairly innocuous purchase to attempt before moving on to more advanced items. 

The purchasing system is a convoluted website with too many links, too many icons, unobvious codes, and hidden tabs. Cornell, as its own veritable planet, has such a large demand for everything that it has special relationships with many suppliers for bulk and discount purchasing, thus the convoluted special purchasing system. 

But, it’s just a stapler, right! No problem.

WELL.

The variety of available stapler breeds was astounding. I scrolled through pages of half strip staplers, full strip staplers, Modern Grip staplers, compact staplers, an antimicrobial stapler (?!?)…. Also one Medical Skin Stapler for $568.  (Hm, maybe I’ll get that number for our cover crops)

I used my executive decision and bought a neon green one.

Then came the actual assigning of funds to the thing: opening links, hitting “submit” and “calculate” hopefully and repeatedly, only to be returned some perplexing error symbol. Finally I got to enter an account number.  And a business purpose. One can’t go buying staplers (or plot flags, or legume inoculant) without proper justification. 

But to justify a stapler?

I got out my best academicese: “Necessary for fastening together informational sheets of paper to promote laboratory organization, drafts to be reviewed by PI, and printed journal articles.”

I wonder how I would have justify the antimicrobial option…