This is not really an advertisement, but it is a testimonial for the best pocket knife I ever owned. My wife started working for Cutco Corp selling knives when she was eighteen and couldn’t land any other job. And like all those kind of jobs the powers that be tell the new sales folks that the first best peach to pick is friends and relatives. So she made sales calls to all the family folks
My Mom and Dad bought a set of knives. They were expensive and very, very good knives. One of us kids has the remnants of the set somewhere. She sold some knives in her short career until she got a job at the print shop. And in the process, I got a little tiny “Dress” pocket knife. It was small, made out of stainless steel and had a blade maybe three-quarters of an inch long. It was very well constructed and was stylish and finely fitted. The blade was serrated and they called it the “Double D” blade. The knife was guaranteed for my lifetime, unconditionally. If it got dull they would sharpen it, if it broke, they would replace it…period, dot.
At the time I worked for a carpet cleaning and disaster clean-up company as a production manager. I was also usually the first one to see a water damage claim that needed emergency service which was usually a call for us to move everything out of the flooded areas and pull up the floor covering or carpet as needed to get the place dried out.
I carried that little knife with me all the time and I used it. It was as sharp as a razor and though I usually used carpet tools to do major cutting I used it sometimes to cut carpet or pad or even linoleum. And it worked in a pinch.
One morning we got a call for a broken pipe water disaster at a local office building. When I pulled up in my van water was coming out the front door and flooding the parking lot. We waited until they got the water shut off and then squeegeed as much water as we could out the front door. We didn’t have any carpet tools with us, our installer had everything on another job, but we had a couple of carpet knives.
The office floor was covered with a thick hi-grade commercial carpet installed over a thick rebond pad. The room was about forty feet wide and maybe seventy-five deep. It was a big room, one flat lay carpet that had to be removed. To get it out, I figured we would need to slice it up pretty small pieces in order to be able to pick it up and move it out.
There were three of us and we started in. We moved all the desks out into the parking lot and started cutting up the carpet. We had two carpet knives and I had my trusty little Cutco Dress Knife. We cut the carpet in long strips a few feet wide, rolled up the strips and carried it outside to our waiting Water Damage trailer, dripping water soaking us and everything in the neighborhood. It was like we were playing in a swimming pool.
My little knife didn’t do well on the carpet; the blade wasn’t long enough, but it was fine cutting the pad, so I cut pad while the other guys cut out carpet. I would cut through the pad and then run that knife all the way across the room as fast as I could move, it scraping on the concrete underneath. And it cut pad all morning like that. I just knew it was going to break, but it never did. I knew then that the blade would get dull. It never did, I could still cut paper with it when we were done. If I had shown you my knife after we were done you would have thought it was brand new.
I used that little knife for years, always had it in my pocket. And it never failed, it never looked worn and never got dull. And like all of the really good things that are small, it disappeared from my life. I lost the best knife I ever owned. Bet it’s still sharp.