Seen in the news
A pencil factory for Nigeria. If it really provides employment for 400,000 people it must be one heck of a factory.
Seen in the supermarket
A magazine that comes with pencils. Int he past I’ve only seen (and bought) ‘children magazines’ (Simpsons, Disney) that came with pencils.
Seen in a shop on FuZhou road in Shanghai
A ‘graphite object’.
From the description:
Please Use! Functional Graphite Object writes like a pencil while resists staining your hands. Handcrafted using a proprietary technique that San Francisco artist Agelio Batle invented. With daily use they should last 7-9 years.
Seen at the chemist [1]Not any old chemist, even a dispensing chemist.
A crazy golf set – with one pencil, one golf putter eraser, three golf ball erasers and more.
Seen at the airport
Cheap Rhodia notebooks [2]Well, cheap for UK standards.. Only €1.20 for a Bloc Rhodia N° 12.
Seen in the catalogue of a distributor of electrical and related products
A Man Mug. Comes of course with a pencil!
The cup is great! 🙂
Functional graphite object…. Spare some money but use the most uncomfortable object ever. That looks overkill.
400.000 new jobs or 400,00?
Incompetent journalists.
Thank you for your comments.
Gunther, but it’s not for anyone, it’s only for alpha males and DIY enthusiasts ;^)
Gianni, it isn’t too comfy to hold, plus there’s hardly any corner on it that can produce a small line – or maybe there used to be, but it broke off or was used up. All it can do now is very broad strokes I can’t see any use for.
About the pencil factory jobs. I wonder whether someone tried to promise the government a bit too much: other news reports claim the same numbers, so it might be journalists just repeating wha they are told without checking. The pencil factory and a ‘flour project’ together are supposed to generate 3.4 million jobs. It does sound very wrong unless the workers are not very productive.
Another older report said Nigeria imports N750 bn worth of pencils a year, that’s about £15 per head pa.
Assuming the factory produces as much money worth of pencils as Nigeria used to import, with 400,000 employees the turnover per employee would be around £6,500 pa. If you look at Nigeria’s GDP per capita ($3200) the number doesn’t seem to wrong, but I still can’t imagine a 400,000 employee factory. Faber-Castell, Staedtler and Tombow together seem to employ only around 10,000 people. Also: Nigeria expects this to happen this year – does that mean going from ‘all the countries pencils are imported’ to having a factory that supplies the whole country? Very odd. I wish the BBC 4 radio programme ‘More or Less’ would look at the figures.