Highlighters are a big part of my life. I am utterly unable to read a non-fiction book (and I read a lot of them) without a highlighter in hand. I consider myself a highlighting professional. I’ve test driven many kinds of highlighters over the years. I’ve come to settle on what I consider to be the Porsche 911 of highlighters: the tank style Sanford liquid accent.
I always have a few extra around the house to avoid a highlighting emergency. However, a big advantage of the Sanford liquid accent is that you can see how much highlighting fluid is sloshing in the tank. This now seems an essential feature of a high-performance highlighter for me.
I can’t imagine driving my car without a gas gauge. Unexpectedly I could find myself stopped by the side of the road at any time. The analogous situation with my non-fiction books is that I could find myself unable to turn a page and keep reading if the only highlighter I had available ran dry. A highlighting professional wants to be able to monitor the fluid supply, just as a NASCAR racer has more engine gauges at his disposal than amateur drivers do.
So here’s my alert to other tank style Sanford liquid accent aficionados: All the evidence points to a conclusion that this highlighter has been phased out of production. A few days ago I went to Fred Meyer to stock up on them and was shocked, absolutely shocked, to not see this item displayed. Ditto with Office Depot, though they haven’t carried them for quite a while.
My fingers were trembling with anxiety when I checked out the Sanford web site this morning. I felt even worse after I ran down the list of liquid accent highlighter choices. Not a tank style among them. Apparently Sanford has gone completely to a weeny pen style that doesn’t hold near enough fluid for someone like me, who may highlight most of a page when the “oh yeah, this is good!” spirit strikes.
Luckily I found an online office supply source that still had a decent supply of the tank style highlighter in stock at a reasonable price. I bought 28 of them (my $50.40 order got me just over the free shipping line). I’m feeling like I should have bought even more, since this is just a several year supply, at most, and I plan on living much longer than that. For the question becomes, is life really worth living without a decent highlighter in hand?
Hopefully I’ll never have to confront that question. If there is a merciful god, or even more likely, greedy capitalists, the tank style liquid accent market niche will be filled again before I run out of my inventory.
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