Fill Our Staplers Day
Fill Our Staplers Day connects Ben Franklin, bug hunting, Daylight Saving Time, and a club for dull men. We celebrate it twice a year, on the day after the shift from Standard Time to Daylight Saving Time on the second Sunday in March and back on the first Sunday in November. It’s also known by the mnemonic “Spring Forward, Fall Back.”
Many people mistakenly believe that Daylight Saving Time was invented by Benjamin Franklin because of his 1784 essay, “An Economical Project.” In it, he described being shocked when he accidentally woke up early and saw that the sun was already up.
After painstaking analysis, he concluded that changing the hour, resetting all clocks, rationing candle wax, enforcing a mandatory curfew, and firing cannons at sunup would encourage the citizenry, who would otherwise fail to realize they could simply rise earlier, to take full advantage of daylight. One wonders if Franklin had to endure the utter lack of understanding of satire so commonplace since the invention of the Internet.
In fact, it was George Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist, who proposed it in 1895, mainly so he could spend more time hunting for insects. Unlike Franklin’s imagined citizenry, he understood he could personally get up with the sun, but still insisted, in all seriousness, that the time must be changed for the entire world instead. About 70 countries observe some variation of it today.
What has that got to do with office supplies? Not much, unless you work by lamplight in a post-apocalyptic hellscape without electricity, which sounds like the plot of a dozen Netflix streamers. A nice bit of Benjamin Franklin trivia may not get you far at a cocktail party, but it could be the secret handshake that gains you entry into the Dull Men’s Club (DMC), originators of Fill Our Staplers Day.
In 2010, the DMC announced its establishment of biannual Fill Your Staplers Days to help spare its members the mild annoyance of discovering they have run out of staples at the last minute before a presentation to their boss, who might have a thing against paperclips. (They know who they are.)
Why has the club designated the day after the time change? “The day clocks change in the spring has been designated as Check Your Batteries Day, ” the DMC website explains. “We could designate Fill Your Staplers Day to be that day as well but, when added to changing clocks and checking on batteries — too much to do all in one day. So we’ll do it the next day.”
That sounds perfectly reasonable to us. Have a happy Fill Our Staplers Day!
