I could have never predicted how much office work is necessary for church ministry and chaplaincy. While my favorite moments have always been interactions with people, all of my ministry-related jobs have involved spending as much time behind a desk as by a hospital bed or on a barstool. Because of this, I’ve learned my way around certain pieces of office equipment. For example, despite being born after 1980, I still know how to use a fax machine; I’m conversational in copier; and, yes, I even know the proper order for triplicate paper is white-yellow-pink. But perhaps no piece of office technology is more fully known to me than the stapler.

As a kid, I quickly figured out how to open up the bases of staplers so my friends and I could try in vain to shoot tiny metal projectiles at one another. To our disappointment, most of the staplers we encountered fired only a few feet— not nearly far enough for a proper battle. In my teenage years, I found a replica of the famous red stapler from the movie Office Space and learned how to take it apart and fix any mechanical glitches it might experience. Nowadays, I can usually tell just by holding a stapler how many pages it can pierce, with what velocity it should be pressed down, and whether to pick it up or leave it on a flat surface when stapling pages. Most importantly though, I never let a stapler stay jammed; all it takes is a paperclip and a little patience, and these essential pieces of office equipment can stay functional for eons. Of course, not everyone shares this outlook.

A few months ago, I was filling out some paperwork with a coworker when he slid a stack of forms into a cheap Bostitch stapler and slammed his hand down onto it. An inferior product, the Bostitch can pierce six pages at most, and it must be handled gently. My coworker had taken the wrong approach, and he glared down at the stapler as its mangled metal mandibles poked lazily into the thick stack of forms. My coworker began violently leaning onto the stapler until I finally intervened.

I had performed this operation plenty of times before: I bent a paperclip and used it to carefully extract the mutilated staple from the Bostitch’s jaws. My coworker expressed gratitude and then promptly slammed his fist back down onto the beleaguered piece of office equipment, causing yet another jam and again barely penetrating his stack of forms. I applied my paperclip technique once more, but when my coworker again raised his hand to pummel the staple, I realized we had entered a Sisyphean pattern. The Bostitch was never meant to staple that many pages, but my coworker didn’t seem to understand this. After I harvested twisted metal from the stapler’s teeth for a fourth time, I slid the stapler away from my aggressive colleague and handed him a paperclip for his forms instead.

Not everything in life is a brute instrument.
Some things require patience, gentleness, and kindness.
Especially people.