A pleasant surprise from Pentel

I was raised on Quicker Clicker mechanical pencils from Pentel. Back when I started using them as a wee lad, they felt heavier and sturdier since they were crafted out of more metal content. Now, Quicker Clickers are mostly made of plastic. But like all Pentel products, they still carry a lifetime warranty.

For pretty much anything else, I don't care about lifetime warranties. First of all, I'm not going to take the trouble to dig up my receipt for something I bought years ago. Second, I just don't care that much about most of the stuff I buy.

But I take my writing implements very seriously. For mechanical pencils, I prefer the Quicker Clicker over anything else. For erasers, I like the Staedtler Mars Plastic but I'll settle for a ClicEraser from Pentel. For ink pens when writing things in my planner, I will go out of my way to get a Uniball Signo RT Gel, 0.38mm in either black, blue, or red.

I keep several Quicker Clickers around at all times to ensure optimal performance, but recently one of them broke. I've sent broken pencils to Pentel before, and they've sent back new ones — without requiring the hassle of presenting the original receipt. I knew that they followed up on their lifetime guarantees.

But this time around, they not only sent it back new, but also filled it up with lead refills and included a separate 12-pack of Pentel lead refills.

Quicker Clicker plus Lead Refills

It's a small gesture, but it's much appreciated from this customer. Thanks, Pentel. Your products continue to be expensive up front but they are totally worth the premium price.

Popular posts from this blog

Arrays in Visual Basic and classic ASP

For the programmer who is used to C-like syntax, working with arrays in Visual Basic or classic ASP can be aggravating. In this post, I will briefly go over declaring single- and multi-dimensional arrays, then iterating through them — the basic operations that make arrays useful. One-dimensional arrays Let's declare an array with six elements. Dim OneDimArray(5) Yes, that says "5", but it has six elements. When we're going through the elements of this array, we'll start counting from zero and end at five. Iterating through one-dimensional arrays For i = 0 to UBound(OneDimArray) Response.Write(i) Next There will be six elements iterated through. General notes about arrays in Visual Basic So far, we're left with the impression that Visual Basic is a strange language. When we declare arrays in VB, the real size is the declared array size plus 1. If you're used to programming in a C-like programming language such as C++ or Java, it's the declared array
Read more

JavaScript: Checking for undeclared and undefined variables

Up until now, the JavaScript I've written has typically been in pursuit of a bigger goal. This means that I worked around language quirks on the spot and moved on. I never stopped to consider the nitty gritty details of the language for commitment to long-term memory, because I wanted to get a working end product. Recently, someone asked me about the best way to check for undefined JavaScript variables. I found myself at a loss, which was alarming to me since doing these kinds of checks is immensely important, practical, and a frequent fact of everyday programming no matter what programming language you're using. The fact of the matter is that most of the time, I know where my variables are coming from. Something like this would work: var x; if (x) x.some_method(); else alert("we can't use x"); In the vast majority of cases where I had to perform a null check, I knew that the variable was declared somewhere because it was of my own maki
Read more

The costs of configurable settings in your web application

By and large, the received wisdom when it comes to configurability and flexible settings for web applications is that more is better. Making something configurable frees up the engineer from having to make mundane (but necessary) changes that can be left to other people. It's desirable to change the state of software without having to rebuild or redeploy the code. There are a lot of obvious benefits to making software configurable, and these benefits are plain to all. What I'm going to focus on here are the costs of configurability, based on my experience and observations over five years of writing web applications full-time. These costs apply to other kinds of software beyond the realm of web applications. I just choose to limit the scope of discussion to web apps because these costs manifest themselves the most when there's a fast development cycle and rapid iteration. The following is intended to be a comprehensive, itemized breakdown of the costs of making an applicati
Read more