For years I’ve kept a small Swiss Army knife on my keychain. I use it almost every day, using the scissors probably the most. I lost my favorite which had a pen instead of a toothpick, but recently my backup to that broke (I sent it back under its lifetime warranty, we’ll see what happens). So I hastily bought another one, also without a pen (the stylus for my Palm TX has a pen in it, so usually I have a pen wherever I go). I regretted it almost immediately because I quickly discovered that Victorinox has a huge number of variations on a theme at Amazon. First, you can get all kinds of colors. I got a dark green one, but you can get the standard red, black, blue, purple, white, pink, yellow, or gray. You can get translucent colors which are called ruby, emerald, amethyst (purple), citrine (yellow), and sapphire (blue). You can get several colors of tie-dye (orange, green, purple, and pink) or you can also get a flowered pattern called Edelweiss with background in red, violet, blue, lime green, or pink.
Like I said, my older one had a pen. I found out this is called the Signaturewhereas without that it is called the Classic SD. If you get a Classic and swap the toothpick for a red LED light, it is called the Swisslite. If you want both the light and the pen (losing the toothpick and tweezers), it is called a Signature Lite.
You can also get a bottle opener with a Phillips head screwdriver, which would come in handy at times. You can trade in your scissors for a bottle opener (a bad idea since the scissors are one of the most useful things on there) and that is called a Rally. Alternatively you can just add a bottle opener, in which case you’d have a Rambler. Take the Rambler and put a pen where the toothpick goes, and it becomes a Manager. Take out the tweezers and put a light and now you have a Midnight Manager. By this time it is about twice as thick as the Classic, but the same length. This is what Jeb has, but he says he doesn’t use the light much, making me think the Manager might be ideal.
If you want something really thin, you can get the metal Alox classic which doesn’t have the toothpick or tweezers. It comes in red, black, green, and blue.
May I also suggest the silver Alox (looks metalic) which Dad most recently had. Although Mom can’t use it because it is hard to open. I think it got a little rusty along the way. Not sure why it is a separate model from the 4 color Aloxi.
I knew I was leaving one out. The silver one looks nice with the red and white crest on it.
All of this sounds like a commercial.
I got a padded envelope from Victorinox today. Inside was a cloth bag with a swiss army log on it and inside that was a black pocket knife. I don’t think it was mine because the plastic doesn’t look scratched up. But it has the tweezers, toothpick, and key ring which my old one did not. And the spring works.
I wound up losing my Manager knife when it came off of my keychain. I started using my backup, a green Classic, but decided I really missed the pen and Philips head screwdriver of the Manager. At Amazon they were about $25, so I looked around for something cheaper. I found a guy on eBay selling used knives supposedly confiscated by the TSA at airports. He had a batch of 3 Managers: two reds and a translucent green one (emerald) with a company logo on it. He wanted $6.50 shipping and the bidding was around $8. I put in a bid for $12.50, but wound up getting beat by a bid one increment above mine at about $13.25 (though now it shows $19, so I’m not sure what happened; maybe I only watched until I was outbid). That’s a pretty good deal, but I wound up finding another eBay seller selling a new Manager for a little less than Amazon, except in black instead of red. I think that store swaps out the “scales” (the colored plastic part) to come up with colors that Victorinox doesn’t sell. They also had white available (I will not make a joke about white managers vs. black managers). There are Classics available in those colors, but not Managers, so they must swap them (or with the Signature which has a thicker scale to fit the retracting pen on one side). Turns out they were in North Carolina so I got it pretty quickly. I need to make sure I don’t lose this one.