The Unholy Brotherhood of the Hole Punch

Recent weeks have seen very interesting developments in the world of office products, but perhaps the most noteworthy was the emergence of the common hole punch as the Parent Corporation's tool of choice. Most of you are aware of hole punches and have seen them in action. Some of you have even used them before, but after you read this post it may be a long time before you find yourself tempted to use one again.

Before we get started, some housekeeping about the nefarious brad. Almost everyone agrees that brads are sinister, but the reasons they are so sinister are not so well known. We exposed several of these reasons in our previous post about the Brad Guys, but several of them remained a mystery. Until now, that is. Recent documents from the Company's archive have cleared up many of the mysteries surrounding the brad, including the real reason the tines are of different lengths. The cult of the brad has been exposed. Unfortunately, the world is not yet ready for the reason brads have tines of different lengths, and many of the secrets of the cult surrounding the brad are better left as mysteries. If you would like more information about either of these topics please submit Form 4482-12J (Request for Sensitive Information Regarding the Company) to your local GNU Public Dictatorship office. If your reasons for knowing are legitimate and you pass a personality profile (and, of course, there are no blemishes from elementary school on your permanent record) we, the Board of Dictators, will meet to decide whether to give you the information. Your other option is to wait until the information can be made available to the general public, but we can't make any promises on how soon that will be.

But enough about what we can't tell you. What we can tell you is much about the dreaded Unholy Hole Punch and the evils associated with it. The history of the hole punch begins in the stone age with cavemen and other neanderthals who decided they needed to punch holes in leather in order to make more fashionable clothing. One bright neanderthal stumbled upon the idea to use a piece of bone to punch a hole in the leather from one of their kills, and the awl was born. Incidentally, for the curious, the reason it was named "awl" is because the inventor's name was Awlaw, or Awl for short. We have spent much time investigating the awl, but we have found no evidence to link it with the perfidious purposes to which the common hole punch has been put. To spell it out more clearly, we do not see any reason for our supporters to discontinue their use of awls at this juncture.

Regardless of the innocuity of awls at their inception, the ideas behind them have been twisted beyond recognition. Many years later when the memory of Awlaw had all but disappeared a new player appeared on the stage. Nobody knows his real name, but the historical record is clear that he told be to simply call him "Mister." "Mister" arrived in Germany in the early 12th century, just when paper was beginning to be common in Europe. He asked a blacksmith to create an "awl for paper," but was disappointed with the result. He finally asked a local clockmaker to design a cross between an awl and scissors, and what emerged was the early version of the common hole punch. "Mister" did not initially cause much controversy with his invention until he started using it to deface public proclamations. The official historical records of the time do not mention "Mister" as he was not caught in the act. The only reason we know is because of the documents we received when "John" surrendered to us earlier this month. As it turns out "Mister" had several more hole punches created and he recruited a small group of loyal supporters whom he called The Unholy Brotherhood of the Hole Punch. They clandestinely punched holes in all of the proclamations issued by the local magistrate, and they made it their business to cut the proclamations up and, with the aid of some twine and their hole punches, transform them into hideous puppets of the local leaders. Interestingly, they always tied their twine in such a way that one lead was longer than the other. In addition to terrorizing the local leaders they also used their hole punches to create holes in paper that could later be filled with other substances, and in this way they maintained a drug trafficking network whose existence was never guessed by the local authorities.

The Unholy Brotherhood of the Hole Punch (UBHP) began to expand, and by the 18th century had convinced nearly all of their neighbors that hole punches were nothing to be feared. This careless attitude toward hole punches has pervaded society even until recent weeks. At the GNU Public Dictatorship we would like to be the first to warn you all that handheld hole punches are anything but innocent, and that continued use thereof will be harmful to your physical, mental, and emotional health. In addition to their history of use in illicit activities and their close association with brads, hole punches have also been linked with personal health issues such as carpal tunnel syndrome, increased arthritis pain, and blood blisters, and with social health issues such as the spread of cholera and the common cold. There have been other studies* that have delved into the link between perforation of paper and delinquency in children, but we believe that most of our supporters are already aware of them. We urge our supporters to err on the side of caution and rid their houses and places of work of these nefarious instruments of evil before the Parent Corporation can use them to enslave us all and make us do their twisted bidding.

* If you have access to a university library or similar facility, a simple search for the keywords "perforation" and "delinquency" should yield quite a number of interesting results. Unless, of course, the Parent Corporation owns the library.