My life has changed dramatically and I wanted you all to be the first to know.

But then I got excited and accidentally blabbed to a bunch of strangers.

Sorry.

First, some background: Out story begins over a decade ago with the birth of the very first dinosaur. It had been bred and hatched by Charles Henry Gould, who would later go on to invent the stapler. You can see he had kind of a theme going:

dinosaur (406x200)

Tragically, shortly after, Gould was eaten by his creation.

The dinosaur was also eaten.

The stapler went on a rampage through Manhattan until it was finally brought down with some Molotov cocktails. ‘Twas butane killed the beast.

Since that time, the design of staplers has been improved by not making them sentient.

I was recently staring at my stapler for fear that it might be sentient. I realized this fear comes from the fact that my stapler has a face inside of it’s mouth, like that monster in “Alien”.

stapler face

Worst of all, this face never looks amused. You don’t need to know how many hours of stand-up comedy I have performed for my stapler. All you need to know is that my stapler hardly ever laughs and never leaves me tips.

But it turns out that this disgruntled face serves a purpose. The “mouth” is what bends the ends of the staple inwards.

Flash forward to today and I stapled something only to find that the ends of the staple had gotten bent OUTWARDS!

At first I thought what any rational person would: a ninja tornado had hit my neighborhood the night before (and obviously I hadn’t woken up because ninja tornadoes are always silent), and carried my entire block to Australia where everything is backwards (ie: water drains the other way, Christmas is in summer, and penguins can fly).

I flushed my toilet a few times to test this theory. I was left with the definitive answer that I don’t know which direction my toilet normally flushes.

Eventually someone pointed out to me that the face on my stapler was upside-down. Apparently you can spin this face around and the “eyes” will bend the staples outwards. Here’s a picture:

20160715_152823 (640x384)

This picture demonstrates 3 principles:

      1. Staple ends can be bent in or out

      2. I am an inconsistent hyphen applier

      3. Meta is fun, hence the staple samples demonstrated on a hand written draft of this very blog post

I can’t believe I never noticed my stapler could do this before.

Seriously. I don’t believe it.

I’m a very observant person and the idea that I went over 30 years without knowing about this is absurd.

Which is how I stumbled upon the truth: I have somehow ended up in a different dimension.

So, hi, everybody! I come from a dimension where staples only bend one way. I have so many questions about what other small differences there might be between your dimension and my own.

Are Twinkies considered a health food?

Is LeVar Burton against literacy?

Are batteries always included?

Are you required to run at the pool?

Instead of ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’, do you practice ‘Cover your eyes, Veer, and Swerve’?

Does my writing actually make me money?

Most importantly: Does William Shatner have a cameo in your Star Trek Movie reboot?

And then I wonder what happened to the Veronica from this dimension? Did she get sent to my single-direction-staple-bending dimension? Or is she now in some dimension where staples are even more strange? I hope for her sake it isn’t the dimension where staples have enslaved humanity and force people to stand around holding papers together all day long.

But even that’s better than the one where pets have enslaved humanity and dictate how people live their lives.

I should know. That’s the dimension I’m from.