Yep, it’s that time again. Time for a brand new look at something awesome.

This time out it’s an everyday device. Something we live with and use constantly. Yeah, those things can be awesome as well. I’m talking about the stapler.

First showing up in 18th century France, the stapler was the little office tool that could. When Sam Slocum patented the first modern “paper fastener” he used pins . It wasn’t a stapler, really, but the road continued to be paved forward with intentions and bundles of paper all stuck together.

George McGill, in 1866 patented a bendable brass paper fastener though. The true ancestor of the modern stapler. Things continued to develop and, really, they never stopped. Still haven’t. Even now you can go get countless types of staplers for countless uses. Staples are everywhere.

As are staple removers, but those are a different subject entirely (and one I won’t go into, probably so let’s just say that I feel that staple removers are more awesome than staplers themselves) so let’s just move on.

The normal, modern stapler is a small device, made of anything from plastic to steel, that drives a bracket of stuff (the staple) through objects and then bends it, using raw force, to keep the objects being stapled together.

Nice! Metal bending tool of destruction! Who didn’t staple someone else as a kid? Or click the stapler to shoot staples at someone else? Maybe you just stapled all sorts of things for no good reason. We’re drawn to them. Staplers are kind of awesome.

Yes I said kind of.

Note that at the top of this entry I did not use a red Swingline stapler. They didn’t even make red until after Office Space became popular. So does the movie up the awesome index of the stapler itself? Maybe a tiny bit. But not to huge results.

The truth is that while staplers are awesome they are simply not very awesome. Oh, it’s true. I mean we have to acknowledge the awesomeness of the stapler, we simply have to! Let’s just not get carried away. Compared to Pat Morita, for example, or Tenzil Kem … well staplers don’t rate much.

But the joy of using them: the noise, the heft and result all come out to a level of awesomeosity. Just not too much of it.

No shame in that. They is greatness in it, in fact! Remember making the awesome index at all does mean that a thing contains awesomeilitude!

So, to be fair and honest here, we come to the inescapable conclusion that staplers have an awesome index rating of LOW.