Battle

Today I went 5 rounds with this guy:

To you non administrative assistant/secretary/office managers, this evil thing is a binder, used to make these pretty little presentation booklets.  Sure, it looks harmless, but believe me...it can cause a lot of headaches/broken nails/frustration.  Today at work I was binding books of data sheets for an install we are about to begin.  I had about 5 books of 100 pages each that I was trying to hole punch, and then attach inside of that black binding comb looking thing.  Sounds easy enough right? Wrong.  It all started to go awry when the hole punch side of it decided to randomly eat pages/put holes in the wrong place.  Well, I say it was random.  It actually wasn't.  This horrid mechanism took specific offense to a data sheet for a hearing impaired system, and decided to eat that specific sheet in 4 of the 5 packets.  I'm seriously considering reporting it the the ADA.
So after reprinting about 20 mangled pages and getting about 500 pages successfully punched, it was time to thread them onto the spiral comb thingy.  The contraption I was using has little fingers that pull the comb apart so you can thread the pages onto each of the 20 spikes.  Welllll......the spirals that fit this model would barely hold the 100 pages for each book and I would try to put like 20 pages on at a time only to find that the 2nd page had missed one of the spikes.  For about the last 15 pages of each book, I ended up just taking the dang thing off the separating fingers and pulling it apart with my own human fingers to thread the pages on.  While attempting to take one of the combs off, I couldn't get the fingers to let go and ended up breaking a fingernail trying to unhook it.  It took me about 2 1/2 hours from start to finish.  Kind of embarrassing...but apparently not enough to prevent me from blogging about it to the interwebs.
The moral of this story is: never underestimate the complexity of a piece of plastic...and next time, use a stapler.