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Fill Our Staplers Day

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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!

Panic Day

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Have you ever wondered how the dinosaurs felt?

panic day

Now’s your chance: It’s Panic Day! (Doesn’t it feel like every day is Panic Day right now?)

PS: Save a little anxiety for International Panic Day on June 18th!

National Proofreading Day

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Why wood ewe knead a proofreader wen yew halve spellcheck?

Spell checkers ken ketch mistakes if there are obvious wons. It docent make sense too higher sum one fro that.

Then again, you’ll never get a second chance to make a first impression.

national proofreading day

Happy National Proofreading Day!

 

National Frozen Food Day

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Today is National Frozen Food Day, which honors the pioneering work of Clarence Birdseye. While living in Canada, he learned from the Inuit how to fish through a hole in the ice. He noticed that the day’s catch froze almost instantly, tasted fresh, and didn’t turn to mush like conventional slow-frozen foods when thawed. Convinced he had discovered something revolutionary, he developed a freezing machine and patented it in 1927.

It took time for the world to catch up. Railroads used ice for its refrigeration “reefer” cars and wouldn’t accept responsibility for possible spoilage. Markets had no freezers to store the fish. Although home refrigerators were available, separate compartments with room for more than a few ice cube trays wouldn’t be introduced until 1940. Birdseye ran out of money, sold his company to Postum Cereals (now Post Consumer Brands), and took a job there.

With the company’s financial resources, Birdseye began the painstaking process of convincing the public what a boon frozen food could be to busy mothers and families. In March 1930, he placed display freezers into several stores in Springfield, MA, stocking them with 27 different foods from haddock to spinach.national frozen food day

Fifty-four years later, Senate Joint Resolution 193 requested that Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States of America, officially designate March 6th as Frozen Food Day. Proclamation 5157 reads, in part:

…The international frozen food industry started in the United States. Frozen vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish were first packaged and offered to consumers in 1930, contributing greatly to the convenience of life and freeing consumers permanently from the cycle of limited seasonal availability of many foods.

Between 1935 and 1940, frozen foods became available to the public on a large scale. During World War II, ration point values posted in stores and carried in newspapers focused public attention on frozen food. Frozen food became a part of the space age when Apollo XII astronauts took frozen meals on board. Seventy-two frozen food items were stored on the Skylab for a five hundred-day supply of meals for the crew…

Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim March 6, 1984, as Frozen Food Day, and I call upon the American people to observe such day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this sixth day of March, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and eighth.

Ronald Reagan

national frozen food day

TV dinner in the Reagan White House

Happy National Frozen Food Day!