When I was in Seattle, I bought a Utilikilt. I thought they looked cool. Before they sent me out the door, they made sure I understood their motto: “Form Follows Function”. Like, LOL for what was uniquivocally a fashion statement. But whatever, that’s their marketing push.
Anyway, I’m giving up on fountain pens, because the functionality is just so much worse than a good ballpoint. If you love fountain pens, good for you, they’re fun and quirky. But in thinking this through, I made a list of ways that ballpoints are functionally superior:
- You can take a ballpoint on an airplane and it (usually) won’t leak
- You can drop a ballpoint on the floor and it won’t explode ink all over the cap
- You can leave a ballpoint out with the cap off and it won’t dry up and refuse to write
- Everybody already knows how to get a ballpoint that isn’t writing to start writing
- Ballpoints hardly ever bleed through the page
- Ballpoints can write on lots of different kinds of paper
- You can use a ballpoint to create enough force to make duplicate checks work
- You can hand your ballpoint to someone else and not worry about them breaking it if they’re used to ballpoints
- If you lose or break your ballpoint, you can get a brand new one almost anywhere
- My favorite pen so far—the uniball roller—comes in a 12 pack for $9.06: about the same price as two loaves of bread
- Wirecutter’s top-rated pen comes 12 in a pack for $11.26
- Ballpoints come pre-loaded with ink that works on just about any kind of paper
- My ballpoint doesn’t feather on the paper of my $5 notebook
- My ballpoint writes a finer line than any fountain pen I own
In the end, though, it came back to the notion that form follows function. I wear a Casio F-91W: a $10 digital watch that loses about 1 second every year, needs the date set once every four years, and needs a new battery about every seven years. A 76ยข ballpoint pen goes along with this well.
When I figured this out, I asked my wife why I thought fountain pens were ever a good idea, and she said “I don’t know, you just get into stuff sometimes.”