oh pencils!

My mechanical pencils finally ran out of lead the other day, so I went to the store. It really surprised me to find that a pack of bic's cost nearly $5 for a pack of 10 and a pack of 2 more expensive ones were around $4. Instead of buying those expensive pencils I went the cheapo route and got a pack of 10 real pencils for $1 and a pencil sharpener for 60 cents (note that the $1 pencils were cheaper than the $1.60 option).
I went hope and immediately opened up my box of pencils so that I could sharpen them all in preparation for all the scan-tron tests that I take. To my surprise I couldn't sharpen any of the pencils. The sharpener would shave away the wood, but when it got down to the lead, the lead would snap off. This same thing happened for all 10 pencils. After shaving about 50% off each pencil I was left with 4 sharp pencils and 6 stuffy pieces of crap.
The next day I woke up with a huge blister on my middle finger.
Moral of the story - Sharpen more pencils more frequently so that I get a huge callous on my middle finger.