Embarking on a virtual staple chase

For two years, www.virtual stapler.com has provided a tie that binds in cyberspace. A quick click on one of the site’s three staplers produces the officious thud that signifies a completed project or finished document.

Clark Allen, a partner in Hays Internet Marketing, a Dallas Web consulting firm, operates the website, which has become something of an online haven for stapler lovers and haters.

What’s so riveting about staplers? Allen has his theories. “It’s perpetual. The old ones, if you get a good stapler, they stay around. They’ve been the same for decades and decades.”

Allen now collects staplers, and plans to add some to the site. And he’s become a font of stapler trivia -- he’ll tell you, for example, that there’s a stapler continuity error in the film “Two Weeks Notice.”

There is no revenue from the virtual stapler site, but Allen fantasizes about a corporate tie-in. “Whenever I see commercials from Staples, I think it might be worth something to them. Maybe they’ll advertise on it.”

Where does a staple man expand in cyberspace? Allen envisions the virtual paperweight, the virtual shredder. The possibilities are all over the office.

-- Michael T. Jarvis