The Unboxing of my new Wacom Intuos Pro drawing tablet with Paper Kit

by Eve, in Design (2 Comments)

In this digital age, getting a real tangible parcel is exciting. Usually. I’m sure I would have been excited to get my nondescript brown box, if I hadn’t been distracted writing an email at the time its presence was announced.

Husband came to stand next to my desk, holding a box. “It’s for you,” he announced.

I was still engrossed. Still writing. Writing something… I don’t know. Something important.

“That’s nice…” I murmured. I didn’t look up.

Husband scoffed. “That sounded sincere.”

I wasn’t ready to stop what I was doing just yet. Certainly not mid-sentence. I’d lose my narrative flow. But I couldn’t just leave him there, hanging, holding a box. I had to stall. “What is it?” I said, my eyes still on my screen. I tried to type faster. If I could just get to the end of the paragraph…

“I don’t know,” Husband was saying, looking over the unlabelled box. “I thought it might be your graphics tablet…”

I stopped.

I stopped mid-sentence.

I probably even stopped mid-word.

And I spun my chair around, eyes wide. “My tablet?!”

I’d forgotten I’d even ordered it. How could I have forgotten that? I still had the courier tracking page open in my mobile browser, and I’d been neurotically refreshing it most of yesterday.

I accepted the box from his outstretched hands and cradled it. Stroked it. Smelled it. It smelled like cardboard and promise. My grin of anticipation just about took the top of my head off.

Then something occurred to me.

“Oh… But what if it’s not?” I bit my lip. “I don’t want to open it, now. Because it might not be, and then… and then…” And then the let-down would break me.

“Oh, no,” Husband said, his mouth turning down, “I shouldn’t have said anything…”

In a moment of indecisive suspense, I didn’t move. Neither did he.

“It probably is, though!” I said, and immediately rummaged through my top desk draw for my Stanley knife.

I forced myself to slow down. If it was my tablet, I’d only have this unboxing experience once; only now. The tablet would never be this new again.

Be slow. Be careful. Be mindful. Take it all in.

Under the rough brown flaps was a beautiful shiny shrink-wrapped white box.

Its two segments spread apart like a book. A magnificent book of illustrated wedge pages.

The first segment opened to show the ink pen of the paper kit, sheets of compatible paper that will allow pen strokes to transfer fine-detail data to the tablet underneath, a clip fastener for holding the paper to the tablet in the same position, and a pencil case to store it all. Well, except for the paper, I guess.

The second segment held the grail. Its matte surface had a tantalising soft sheen. I took it out the box. It was lighter than I expected. Much less cumbersome than my previous tablet.

I took the clip fastener from the first segment, and squeezed it open. Felt its spring tension. Good. Strong. When I put it on the tablet, it grasped it securely. Yes, any paper sheet under there wouldn’t be going anywhere.

There was stylus pen in compartment underneath where the tablet had been, a weighted stand housing alternative nibs, and the cable that would marry it all to my computer.

A new tablet. A new Wacom tablet. I had a new Wacom tablet.

Logo work—for a start—would be so much easier now!

I’d been managing to work with an optical mouse for so long, that I’d almost forgotten what it was like to create with a sensitive pen instead of the world’s fattest crayon. I still have my old drawing tablet–an Intuos 3—but it’s so dated my computers don’t read it anymore. It’s a foot-long paperweight. Bigger, if you count its surrounding frame.

But now I have a new Wacom tablet, with over 8,000 pen sensitivity levels. It’ll detect everything I draw, telling my computer about the very faintest stroke.

It was a perk to discover its mat doubles as a touchpad, the cursor onscreen responsive to my fingertips skimming the top—which means the Wacom puts my mouse right out of a job, but gives the rest of my time and equipment plenty to be getting on with.

After I finish writing my email, left off mid-word.