To what piece of technology would you write a “love letter."

There is a reason the 21st century is called the information age. Smartphones, social media, etc define the modern world. I remember adopting one innovation and how it changed my life. The mechanical pencil was long before my lifetime (google says 1877), but it wasn’t a part of my life until middle school or so. Whereas boring technologies like computers and phones have surrounded me all my life. 

I lied. I did know about mechanical pencils before I fell in love with them. My first introduction to mechanical pencils were those awful ones that required you to twist them to push out more lead (why do we call it lead if everyone knows it’s graphite) and were tipped with garbage erasers. My younger self would always push his pencil into the paper way too hard, and I would snap the lead over and over again. I still push into the way heavier than I need to, as evidenced by the first page of my Junior year US History notebook becoming smudges of lead with a few legible words thrown in the mix. When I did finally make the switch to mechanical pencils, it’s safe to say that my life changed forever. 

The biggest change they made to my life is that they’ve improved my handwriting. When regular pencils became dull my handwriting looked so much worse. It became messy with letters and words blending into each other. To someone who is still a beginner to mechanical pencils, it may appear that mechanical pencils are always perfectly sharp and never dull. But they are wrong. When using pencils with lead on the thicker end (>0.5mm) you occasionally find that your mechanical pencil won’t write as cleanly as you’re used to. When this happens I usually just snap the lead of my mechanical pencil which creates a very sharp tip to write with. Even if mechanical pencils aren’t always perfectly sharp, they’re always better than wooden pencils and they are so much less effort. That is the epitome of all technological development. Mechanical pencils are better and require less work and maintenance than their outdated analog counterparts. 

I could easily live a day without my phone, but how am I supposed to live without a mechanical pencil? What should I write with? A regular pencil? I don’t even carry one. What if it becomes dull? I can’t tell you a single place to sharpen a pencil in all of Uni. I hate writing in pen. I hate shaking them every five minutes and scribbling over my many spelling mistakes; plus 90% of my handwritten work is in math and physics where erasing entire pages of work is guaranteed. 

This essay has pretty much just been me trying to convince you as to why you should love the mechanical pencil as much as I do rather than being a love letter to it. So to finish I’m going to write a haiku about mechanical pencils.

I hate sharpening

I love your fine writing point

What a great breakthrough