I bring my own pens to work.
Michigan’s Capitol Building is the most decorated building in North America in terms of hand-painted acreage (a fact known to us only because there are people who apparently monitor the hand-painted acreage of this continent’s buildings). It was opened in 1879 and the tour book given to visitors even today calls it a “monument to the arts” and notes the building’s “elegance, craftsmanship, and grand opulence.” It was one of the finest achievements of Elijah E. Myers, a man famous for his work on the nation’s state capitol buildings.
Myers had been dead for 90 years when the Anderson House Office Building opened across the street in 1999. It was designed by a firm whose portfolio also includes senior living facilities in Scottsdale, Arizona and a shopping center next to the Tampa Airport. It is, in a word, inoffensive. There are small screens in the elevators tuned to CNBC and the whole place smells like a dentist’s office.
The building is filled with people like me who are keenly aware that they owe their very existence to Michigan’s taxpayers. My service, for example, comes at a cost to the average Michigander of slightly less than half of one cent annually. A resident of this state who, on the morning of New Year’s Day, buys a peppermint from the box on a gas station counter for a dime, has paid in sales tax on that mint their share of the State’s Ian McKnight Fund for the whole year.
At the risk of showing my bias, I think this is a tremendous bargain for the public, but it does come with a grave obligation of stewardship. “Public office,” various ethics manuals tell us, “is a public trust.” This is inspiring and endearing, and it is also the source of an endlessly amusing cult of austerity which is responsible for everything from the inoffensiveness of the office building to the process for ordering a pencil sharpener.
The office supply distribution process is a triumph of the spirit of bureaucracy. Perhaps a hundred different items of varying usefulness are available to the good people of the Michigan House of Representatives, each with its own specific limit on consumption so that nobody gets too greedy.
ADDING MACHINE PAPER — 1 roll per month, per machine
I prefer a phone calculator, but there are economists hiding deep within the building. Maybe this is a big deal for them.
BOXES - SHIPPING / MOVING TYPE - (17-1/4" X 11-1/4" X 11-1/2”)
These, one must imagine, are the final order for those who lose their elections or reach the end of their term limits. They are listed directly above calendars to remind us of the passage of time and the end that awaits us all.
CALENDAR
Six different types are available for 2021.
CD-RW VERBATIM AND ENVELOPE SLEEVE — 1 per person per month
The limit of 1 per person per month adds to the mystery of what anybody would do with these in the Year of Our Lord 2020.
GUMMED REINFORCEMENTS — 1 box a month
I do not know what these are, but I am intrigued.
HAND SANITIZER GEL WITH MOISTURIZERS — 1 BOTTLE PER OFFICE A MONTH
A new addition from March. The moisturizers are a rare extravagance in the world of state government.
PEN - BALLPOINT RETRACTABLE MED - BLACK INK — 2 or 3 each
This is where things start to get controversial. People feel strongly about pens. I am not a pen snob in the way that some people are, but I have standards. I find the pens offered by the House to be entirely unusable. As a result, I bring my own pens to work. This is the ingenuity of the cult of austerity: mediocre pens are not only inexpensive, but they stop people from using them at all, thus saving the taxpayers tens of dollars annually. The Senate, we are told, has Pilot G-2s.
PENCIL SHARPENER, ELECTRIC- *CHARGED TO ALLOTMENT — 1 Per Office, Representative signature required.
Only the most coveted items have the distinction of requiring a signature. Also in this category is STAPLER- HEAVY DUTY. One can only imagine the chaos if people could go around ordering staplers and pencil sharpeners with reckless abandon like they were gummed reinforcements or adding machine paper.
The new year will bring Michigan’s 101st Legislature and a handful of brand new state representatives. These are people who have devoted many months to campaigning for this position and who have now arrived at the next exciting chapter of their journey. They will bask in the Capitol’s elegance, craftsmanship, and grand opulence. They will shape public policy.
But they will still have to watch CNBC in the elevator, and, if their staff are so bold as to wish for a PENCIL SHARPENER, ELECTRIC- *CHARGED TO ALLOTMENT, they will have to sign a very boring form.
Distractions
Things I have been reading and watching.
“Notes for the Graphic Designer of the American One Dollar Bill,” Joe Moore in McSweeney’s.
“If we do the spider-webby background on the front, it should look more spider webby on this side. I don’t know how else to describe that to you, but I’m sure you know what I mean.”
“We Interrupt This Broadcast to Bring You an Especially Cursed House,” Kate Wagner in McMansion Hell.
Multiple people this week sent me a Zillow listing for a McMansion in New Jersey which is so offensive to any sense of goodness and decency that I gasped aloud when I first saw the pictures of the interior. This weekend, Kate Wagner at McMansion Hell broke it down for us.