what the bic? an open letter
Dear Bic,
I am writing to thank you for your creation of the revolutionary Bic ‘for Her’ range of pens.
When I was a little girl I was considered to be a little different. At school I was taunted and cast aside. At recess the other girls took their dolls away from me, during art class all the pink and purple crayons were taken so I was left with boys colours, and at lunchtime all the other girls ran away from me so all I could do was spend the break in the bathrooms and look at myself in the mirror.
All this happened because I had a dream.
I used to watch the boys receive their pen licenses at school assembly with a mixture of disappointment and jealously coursing through my veins, knowing that because I was a girl I could never receive one, because pens were made for men.
Then, one day, scratching away at my scrap paper with a blunt pencil, after watching another of these joyous presentations I thought, ‘Why can’t girls use pens? Surely they are no different to the cylindrical object I am currently grasping?’
So like a silly woman I tried to use a pen, but as so often happens, I quickly learned the folly of my ways. I found the object rather phallic, and felt very embarrassed to be holding it. I was intimidated by its size and had trouble both keeping it perched between my dainty lady fingers and lifting with my feeble lady muscles. I found it wrote much smoother than I was used to, it casting scrawls across the page on the frequent occasions where my wrist flicked uncontrollably during my bouts of hysteria. Finally, I learned the hard way that mesta mistook mistakes cannot be erased.
But 15 years later, thanks to you, Bic, my dream has been realised. Thanks to your slimmer design that fits my lady hand I can now control my actions, and am no longer terrified by the sight of a pen. I can now write out my recipes with ease. I still make many mistakes when I write, but I’m a woman, so that’s to be expected!
Once again, thank you. I eagerly await your next pen line, Bic ‘for Idiots in the Product Development and Marketing Departments’.
Sincerely,
Melissah Comber
My favourite review of this product is the one on Amazon by the unfortunate fellow who purchased it and found it didn’t work for him:
“I bought this pen (in error, evidently) to write my reports of each day’s tree-felling activities in my job as a lumberjack. It is no good. It slips from between my calloused, gnarly fingers like a gossamer thread gently descending to earth between two giant redwood trunks.”
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