Pens Must Die

I'll miss pens when they go. I like how they feel. I like that handwriting is almost impossible to fake. I like that when I receive a letter, I can tell who sent it just from how they write the address. But it all has to go.

Pens have some advantages over computers. One can generally access a pen-record faster - just open the notepad and it's there. Modern software is so badly programmed that it's often easier to find a page in a notepad than to open a text document. And it's resilient - even if rain doesn't do paper any favours, anyone can still read a page which has been rained on. Taking out a computer in the rain is just madness.

Despite the advantages, pens must go. The transfer times are just too slow, and revisions are awfully slow. Once I reach 60, my generation will be in charge of politics. Once I reach 70, my younger brother's generation will be in charge of politics, and most won't have written anything by hand since their university forced them to. They will remember their hands irritating from the archaic tool while they yearned to return to the method they used to write all the proper essays, on the nice machine where they could instantly access information. They will remember the stunted tool with a little bitterness. And around that time they will - hopefully with a political system faster than our current one - start to remove the necessity of pens from the education system.

So my guess for the death of the pen is 2058. The sad part is that if I tried to show a child in that year that I could type without a computer, they probably wouldn't be able to read my handwriting.