Safety Pins
By Dave "Kilnger" Sek
Noted local marathoner, ultramarathoner and hash runner Dave Sek sent in this contribution in the middle of one of the worst Januaries in recent memory. Perhaps it's the result of some kind of cabin fever. Who knows? We hope Rochester Running Page readers enjoy it... and that Dave finds some effective medication soon...
I was recently contacted by a representative of the American Safety Pin Council. He asked if he could come to my office to talk to me about a subject of great importance.
I couldn't imagine why someone from such an obscure organization would ever contact me and even how he got my name. Curious, I asked what this was all about. He found out somehow that I was a runner, and he told me that he knew that runners use a lot of safety pins to attach their race numbers to their running apparel. That sure sounded logical, so I agreed to the interview. It should be fun and I hoped to add to the Council's information and perhaps help them in marketing programs.
What followed was totally unexpected.
Two weeks later three men showed up at my office. Two of them looked like Secret Service agents who would love to take a bullet for the President. What followed seemed almost like an interrogation of Saddam.
The first few questions were easy puffballs to make me feel at ease.
Then he asked what we do with the pins after a race.? Do we return them? Do we put them to other uses around the house? Do we pin diapers with them?
I thought for a few seconds and answered no to all these questions.
Then it became a hardball session. "Why don't you return them? Where do they go? Are you keeping a ten pound bag of them somewhere?"
He then went into a dialogue about our alleged misuse of safety pins and accused us of causing a worldwide shortage of the item. He brought up some statistical information that backed his allegations.
Like if a runner uses 4 pins and there are 300 runners in a race, that's 1200 safety pins. If a community the size of Rochester has 30 races a year, that's 36,000 pins. Some races draw 1000. that would be 4000 pins. "What about the Boston Marathon" he asked? 15,000 runners. That's 60,000 pins.
In the United States alone if you had 50 communities that had our averages, that would be 1,800,000 safety pins. Worldwide, the numbers are probably in the hundreds of millions!
Again, he asked, "what do you do with them?" I thought for a while and answered honestly, "I don't know." I said that I always have a few extras in my gym bag but of all the races that I've done I don't know where the others went. He had me going for a while and I even started to sweat a little.
Then I started thinking and I started to ask a few questions. Why should you care where they all go?
The safety pin manufacturers must love us. We make them disappear and they get to manufacture more of them. He answered that he doesn't represent the safety pin manufacturers. Rather, his organization exists to get safety pins to people who don't have them and have a hard time getting them. Mostly this is in third world countries and some of the more repressive Communist countries and a few selected dictatorships.
Before the running boom he said that used safety pins were abundant and that he had no problem getting them where needed. But now he estimates that only about 5% of all safety pins are recovered, and he blames it all on the running community. He accused us of keeping about 80% of the used safety pin supply out of circulation. He kept hammering me with the question: " What do you do with them?"
He said that if it wasn't for us, people in ruthless dictatorships would be getting the safety pins they needed. He got right in my face and said that if I didn't help him he would take civil action and he would ruin us.
I stammered and said I would do would I could to help. As a start I said I would talk to people in my running group to see what they did with their safety pins, and if it would help we could try to locate some of our pins from past races and get them back into circulation. That's really all I could do for now, I told him. He said that's a start but probably not enough. He said he will be meeting with running groups all over the country and he would be following up with me in a few months.
He got up and thanked me for my time and said he would be in touch. The two goons sneered and went with him. I told him to call for our next appointment. So I can have my lawyer present.
Editor's note: Dave, you shoulda told them "You'll never pin this one on me!"
Copyright © 2004 Dave Sek