A counter pen (also known as a Security pen) is a pen designed to be affixed to the counter or table of an institution, such as, typically, a bank or post office by some means, typically a chain, ball chain or plastic cord, complicating the accidental or purposeful removal of the pen from the counter. As an alternative, cheap ballpoint pens frequently have an artificial flower attached to the shaft of the pen by wrapping both items in florists' tape. This had the dual purpose of making the pen serve as part of a somewhat tacky but acceptable counter decoration when several similar pens are grouped together in a glass container to serve as a "flower vase", but it makes the pen harder to accidentally steal when the user obviously notices that the pen is adorned with an inconvenient decorative accoutrement.
Pens in banks and other financial organisations may also be affixed to avoid potential harm to staff. Artist Daniel C. Boyer has used counter pens to make drawings that have appeared in several exhibitions; the unwieldy, attached cord influences the drawing by hampering it.
Famous quotes containing the words counter and/or pen:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“His meter was bitter, and ironic and spectacular and inviting: so was life. There wasn’t much other life during those times than to what his pen paid the tribute of poetic tragic glamour and offered the reconciliation of the familiarities of tragedy.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948)