Cross Ballpoint Pen Refill – Black – Fine – Dual Pack

The two pack is somewhat superfluous given that I will, most assuredly, lose the second refill long before I empty the first given that the longest thing I write in this digital age of ours is the one check I still mail out each month. I’ve been considering giving that up and just having my bank automatically cut a check each month, but, maddeningly, one can only select the date the automatic check will be sent and not when it will arrive. What if, the paranoid portion of my brain wonders, the date I select for the check to be sent out falls on the Saturday of a weekend with a banking holiday on Monday causing my payment to be delayed a full three days, making my payment arrive late, and ultimately resulting in my having to pay late fees? Why can’t I just select the date I want the check to arrive and have the bank’s software walk the date back automatically and figure out when the check needs to be sent out in order to arrive in time? I’ll tell you why: because then I would never write anything longer than the word “milk” and it would take 9.3 times longer for me to need another Cross refill. That’s minus 1 star, Cross.You lost the second star because the photo of the pen refills clearly shows them mystically floating in a white void. I was, therefore, understandably upset when I opened the box to find them nestled in mundane cardboard and plastic packaging. If I’d wanted such boring packaging I could have gotten in my car, driven to Office Depot/Max, paid three times as much, wasted approximately an hour of my time and burned some fossil fuels in the process! Alternatively, I could have ordered the generic brand that never writes as smoothly for 76 cents less. Instead, I was seduced by the promise of pen refills endowed with powers of levitation. For shame.As for the three stars you actually earned: the pen refills write beautifully, fit perfectly into my pens and are an all around quality product. See what you can do about addressing the two issues above and I’ll consider revising my review and giving you some stars back.