Marketing pencils

I read about this pencil maker, a count, who threw 144 pencils out a window to show they were stronger and better than other pencils.

Were they?

Apparently not one broke. Amazing, huh. Anyway, I wanted one of these pencils for myself. I can’t afford luxury goods but I thought I could stretch to a good quality pencil. I found one in Yuzawaya. Only 80 yen.

That much? You get a whole dozen Chinese 2Bs for only a hundred yen at the one coin store. Does yours write well?

You bet. Look. I proved that the German pencil writes much better than the Chinese pencil. I ran a scientific test. I wrote a word using a 2B Chinese pencil and the same word using a 2B Faber-Castell. Controlled all the variables. Temperature, lighting, humidity, speed of writing. Even wrote the words at the same time.

Yourself?

Of course. What’s the point of using two different people? I used the Chinese pencil in my left hand and the German pencil in my right hand.

A somewhat skewed test, wouldn’t you say? So how does it handle? What will the German instrument do that a Chinese one won’t?

All right. Not a lot in it. But you get this feeling of power, that you are using something that costs ten times the price of anyone else’s pencil.