Mil-spec means the cheapest product that can be mass produced, marketed from a buddy of a guy that makes up the red tape somewhere high up the chain. Certain things are good, in spite of mil spec.

That is freaking awesome, it's like a refrigerator that still had lead shielding.

I haven't worked for the government for 6 or so years, but the last box of skillcraft I had maybe 3 worked out of the box, and not one made it through annotating a paper. It was so bad that I bought a box of cheap store brand ones for myself so I could take notes.

The old style hard black plastic with the striped metal collar in the middle took a nosedive in quality about 10 years ago. As another comment mentioned I don’t even get a 50% good rate brand new.

The newer all plastic models are far more similar to what those used to be and I have a few going on 8 or 9 years of off and on use that are great.

That's rather amazing, probably the only one that still does. They have a multi pen (red, black, 5mm pencil) that worked well. But all the other pens and markers they produce are terrible. We had a running gag at an office, tracking how many markers a single meeting might require. Unless we didn't use a marker at all or only wrote the date on the board and nothing else, the average was at least 3 per hour meeting.

Every skill craft pen is assembled by blind slaves who in order to receive the social services they require to exist in our society must work in Pen sweatshops

Edit: sorry the slave master approved term is a "sheltered workshop"

Is that same model that NASA spent millions to develop?

OK, I'll file with my US Govt pen.