Mechanical Pencil Overkill

I found these on a recent foray to our local house-o-office-supplies. A large pack of mechanical pencils. That look just like real pencils. um, huh?


Is there some tyrannical, gestapo school district out there forcing its students to rely on the antiquated wood-and-carbon sticks for communication, driven by secret kickbacks from the pencil lobby? Is there a heroic rebal alliance of forward-thinking students distributing these cloaked, highly advanced writing instruments to like-minded learners? Perhaps they are designed thusly in order to help the technophobe masses ease themselved into the advanced technology of non-sharpened pencils. I can see some confusion on that front, especially when granny first inserts one of these mimic wonders into her Grindapoit2000 5hp gas-driven pencil sharpener. Or maybe they just look kinda cool. I'll concede that they do.

An even better question though - WHY THE WEEPIN' JEHOVA DO YA NEED 28 OF THEM? They're MECHANICAL so they're REFILLABLE! So you can REUSE them! I checked, it says so on the package. Even accounting for loss, or -horrors- mechanical failure, 28 seems like more than overkill. And why 28? That's obviously smaller than the average class size in secondary education, and golf courses would need a smaller version, without erasers of course. Wouldn't 30 or even 25 make more sense? I suppose odd numbers would make the even distribution of yellow and black models more difficult.

It looks like one more product is happily answering a question no one asked. Don't we all feel safer because of it?