It hung at the front of the class beside the blackboard, which was usually green or blue. A heavy metal foot anchored to the wall an oval casing, graced with a metal dial of holes, each waiting its turn to be rotated over the round black eye that stared a line paralell to the wall all the way to the teacher's desk. Within that thin casing, two twisted horrors lurked, bound together and turned by a crank. Every child feared those gears, picturing their own finger inserting that channel where it was chewed, and turned to pulp among the piles of shavings.
Between lectures, you could cross the carpet and insert your pencil, and turn that crank, interrupting the silence with the grinding of those gears. You'd pull back a precise point, gleaming beneath the flourescents, needing only a quick puff from your lips to remove the chaff. The newly crisp line on your paper would bring a satisfied smile to your face, well worth braving the ominous sharpener's stare.
Years of school, and lots of practice, bring with them the hubris of ink. Blues, blacks, reds stand out more boldly and more permanently on the page. These marks cannot be erased, and so we believe they needn't be. And if not a pen, the insubstantial media of 1's and 0's, mediated by the keyboard that occupies the primary work space. The printer translates those tappings with its crisp laser, shooting out sheets of paper hot off the custom press. At the very least, the pencils we use are now mechanical, with tiny sticks of .5 graphite, ready at the click of the eraser.
Another childhood terror diminishes, becomes obsolete. If you hunt around your office, you'll find the token, grudging presence of their electric counterparts, sitting for the most part on some table in a room down the hall from your desk, ready to growl your old fashioned PaperMate down to a fine point and reinvoke that ghost of the past.
