What are your paper clips telling others?

smawkward(49)

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#life

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I never would have thought that a paper clip could reveal so much about my personality

I have used paper clips more for making little tools than I have for actually clipping paper together. Opening sim card trays, cdrom trays, and reseting electronics is why I keep them on my desk. They have also been used to pick locks on filing cabinets that I have lost keys for. ;)

More often than anything else though when I find a loose paper clip I tend to fidget with them. For one poor teacher I remember making a long chain out of all the paper clips in a jar on her desk then put them back for her to find later. Most of the time I find myself just bending them out of habit.

Bending paper clips is a perfectly normal thing to do right?

Well apparently I am not alone. A psychiatrist in Zurich, Mario Gmür developed a personality test and authored a book "The Paperclip Test: A Personality Quiz Like No Other" from studying how his patients bent the paper clips on his desk into shapes. His paitents would leave them on the desk and he started saving them.

I just got his book today and it has 60 different paper clips on the personality test. It suggest not reading about the paper clip personalities until after doing the test.

Opps! I had already read about some of them.

A New York Post article describes some of the personalities and that is how I found out about the book. So I will have to wait a little bit before I take the test.

I plan on sharing my findings from the personality test with another post. I am not sure how long I am going to wait before taking it. I think the wait will help me be less biased.

Mario Gmür's paper clips have some interesting names. "The Pyromaniac", "The Hulk", and "The Nosy Parker" are just a few.

When I was first looking at the descriptions I found a few that I thought I might have made before. "The Procrastinator", "The Natural Host", and "The Seducer" looked really familiar.
I didn't particularly like knowing about "The Seducer" one.