I asked my sweetie the other night what his favorite office supply is.

“Calipers,” he answered without hesitation. “That is one thing I have on all of my desks.”

Even if he weren’t a mechanical engineer, I bet he’d still pick calipers. He was this close to also majoring in history, and he cooks and bakes almost every day while listening to music or to Terry Gross. He does not talk politics at the office unless he feels like being the odd one out—both in his beliefs and his advocacy work. But he does like to be precise.

Despite being in almost all ways more like me than his cubicle mate, he is such an engineer, in that he likes to be on time, if not early. He doesn’t just hang a picture on the wall and then accept its crookedness as out-of-the-box living, he measures and subtracts—and measures and subtracts again, to make sure—and laments the evaporating water in his level. He used some sort of engineering software to design a star with equal-sized points that he then transferred onto felt and sewed for our Christmas tree topper this year.

Remember that one scene from the Cosby Show spin-off A Different World in which prissy Whitley tells finding-herself Denise that a cluttered desk indicates a cluttered mind, and Denise responds by asking what, then, Whitley’s empty desk means? What office walls will placate the cubicle drones, how can we feng shui our conference room—the joke is hardly new anymore, but I had to think about it again when my sweetie pulled his calipers out of his holster. Usually the best I can do with my desk is a clean workspace with a towering and slightly disheveled pile of to-file papers, but my desk always seems to fit the room best in such a way that it is not in the far corner and my back is to the door. Usually I sacrifice the practicality of a binder clip with the loosey-gooseyness of something purchased at a shop more design-forward than office-supply.

Is it too much to equate favorite office supplies—my sweetie with (unhesitatingly) his calipers, me with (currently) my spiral paper clips—with personality and work-aptitude, with our Myers-Briggs, whether we cross right over left or left over right, the way the creases swoop and meander across our palms?

Is it too much to wonder if universal happiness could be found in rubber bands—wholly practical, totally bendable and twistable and unbendable, eventually de-elasticked: nothing is permanent?

Yes, it is possibly off the mark. Probably; likely. Considering this post with metaphorical calipers, reluctantly.