Your favorite color

[DiplomaNurseRN]

Who else remembers the days of '3 color charting'? I hated the funky Bic pen green on evenings, ugh. Then someone came out with the tri-color pen which had individual clickers for red, green and blue. Blue??? Personally glad all of that fell to the wayside when we went all black with our notes.

[Eleven011]

I've charted many a note in bright red pen!

[sevensonnets]

I hated those tricolored Bic pens with a passion. You had to press very hard to make them write and after a few charts your hand would cramp. Then you couldn't read what you wrote because the ink was so light. And they sprouted legs and walked off if you laid yours down somewhere.

[amoLucia]

The barrels were either orange (light script) or blue barrel (heavy script).

I would put tape on the barrel just to designate the pen as mine, altho that didn't always work all the time.

And then you would get someone who would use a felt tip colored pen and the page's ink would smudge or 'color run' if damp.

I think my desk still has some boxes of the individual colors still there - I've retired some time ago.

[JBudd, MSN]

Our color was designated by which 8 hour shift we were working. Nights got red (must be for the red eyes), and it couldn't be xeroxed, or even made out after a while. I'm sure many hours of my charting have long since become illegible.

[elkpark]

I charted in green on second shift (and red when I covered third shift, of course :)). I still (>30 yrs later) have the four color Bic ballpoint I was issued by my first employer out of nursing school -- I haven't used it in a kazillion years, but I've managed to hang on to it for sentimental reasons. Mine is the blue-barrel model.

I always thought it made a lot of sense to be able to glance at a page of charting and instantly see the notes differentiated by shift (instead of laboriously picking your way through pages of tiny, cramped writing in all black, trying to find the notes you're actually looking for).

[NotMyProblem MSN, ASN, BSN, MSN, LPN, RN]

Green here (evening shift way back when). We were issued one of these things on a white rope. I thought it was so special and kept it for many years after the ink was gone from each color....until I realized those were not 'special nursing only' pens (how na'ive I was). I hated using them because they felt so bulky in my small hands. To not have one meant that we were out of uniform (per the nursing instructor).

In in addition to the pen, we had this white thing that held our bandage scissors, a very small, spiral-top, flip notepad, and a 6-inch clear ruler. This 'pocket' of items was to be kept inside the pocket of our blue-and-white striped pinafore. We were checked off on this as a part of our uniform every single day.

Memories......

[jennylee321]

Props to all of you that held on to these pens for so long. I'm pretty proud if I still have the pen that I started with at the beginning week