My status pen and some smiles

My wife is changing jobs, within the same organization next week, and her current team threw her a “going away” party.

She showed me a gift from her team.

It was a Montblanc pen.

It caused me to, almost immediately, reminisce and smile.

Back in the 80s, Montblanc pens seemed to be in most every male physicians top shirt pocket.

I bought one, I’m sure, because I was trying to “keep up with the Joneses.”

Montblanc pens were comfortable and wrote smoothly; favorable attributes in a time when an incredible amount of writing was required for documentation (electronic medical records (EMRs)  did not become significantly utilized until the mid-to-late 2000s).

But truthfully, I rarely used mine because I always thought the refill cartridges were too expensive (and that recollection is what initially made me smile)!

Obviously, we don’t use pens nearly to the same degree anymore, so the same ink cartridge has been in my Montblanc pen for years and I prefer Gelly Roll pens (which appeared around 1988) now, when a need to write arises.

But for some reason, I felt a strong need to reach into my fancy-pen stash to show my wife my status pen from the 1980s, when she showed me her Montblanc (she didn’t know I owned one).

But after, when I thought about how ridiculous that need to “keep up with the Joneses” was, it made me smile again.