My Fisher Space Pen leaked; the brand's legendary status is in jeopardy! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
(Think calming thoughts Baz…)
On Tuesday I dropped my pen, thought nothing of it.
On Wednesday I noticed excessive smudging (I'm left-handed.)
Today I got my magnifying glass out after a particularly nasty blob of ink appeared on my planner. And transferred to my finger. And highlighter pens. A blob of ink that even after half a day resisted all attempts to cover by careful applications of white paper from an on-a-roll dispenser.
Now the magnifier is ordinarily almost useless, having a too-small, rectangular, lowish powered main glass and a tiny ancillary, but insanely-powerful inset magnifier. It's with this second, a lens having an extraordinarily shallow focus depth, that I found the end of the pen refill had split.
When it dropped, all-of 73cm onto industrial-strength office carpet, it must have impacted something hard-enough to break one side of the ball retaining sleeve.
Unprecedented.
Yes, I have got a spare refill.
Phew!
It - a fine point replaced by the new-year medium black - is about to run out.
Living on borrowed time now; it's probably the most excitement I'll have all week.
Let's face it, at work on an otherwise-unremarkable day, I managed to defeat the very best American engineering - a pen designed to write in zero-G, upside-down, underwater, in extraordinarily hostile environments - by dropping it on the floor.
Danger, it follows me everywhere.
Addendum:
It's a myth that the Americans spent squillions of dollars developing the pen whilst the Russians used a pencil. Snopes.com link.