Don't Buy Cheap Tape

 My college job was working in the theatre. I hung and focused lights, lay cable, moved chairs on and off the orchestra pit, taped down cable and Marley floor for modern dance, and other duties as assigned. One of those other duties was opening up the theatre for an 8:00am Monday-Friday music class, but I digress. 

I got to know theatrical tape very well during the years I worked in theatre. Spike tape, paper tape, duct tape, and gaff tape. Spike tape is glow in the dark, used for marking the spot (spiking) where set pieces or actors need to be in order to be in the aforementioned focused light. Paper tape is basically thick, black masking tape, and theatres likewise use black duct and gaff tape. We primarily used gaff tape to tape down cables that had to run along the floor. It is super adhesive, like duct tape, but even after weeks of holding something firmly in place, peels off without leaving a residue like painter's tape. Super useful stuff.

Fast forward to about five years ago, moving into my fifth classroom in my fourth school, when I was lamenting the fact that painter's tape was too lightweight to hold up my laminated items double mounted on colorful cardstock. One of my new coworkers said to use gaff tape and asked if I had ever heard of it. It was a literal face palm moment for me. 🤦 Of course! Gaff tape! Why hadn't I been using it for all my classroom poster hanging needs??

This year I had a tiny bit of my previous roll of (purple) gaff tape left. So I ordered a new roll from Amazon. I saw that my previous order of one roll was only slightly less expensive than an order of two rolls of a different brand. Like a dummy, I ordered the cheap brand.

I used the new tape to hang up a huge set of adjectives above the window in my new classroom as well as several posters and a "Read Like a Historian" sign that had three iterations before actually being laminated and ready to hang. (I spilled lunch on the first one I created before it was laminated, I sent the second one through the laminator crooked enough that the last third of it was totally destroyed, though thankfully it did not jam up the laminator. I had middle school helpers make a third one that was laminated without incident.)

It's been hot. As seems to be common in older school buildings without AC, the building compounds the heat, insulating it. Everything I hung with the new tape started to drip off the wall or out and out fell to the floor overnight. I had to jump up on the counters and vent to pull down the adjectives so they wouldn't fall behind the vent, becoming ridiculously challenging to retrieve. Items that were light enough to hang with painter's tape stayed up without issue. Seriously, when paper tape holds better than gaff tape can you even call it gaff tape?

I ordered new tape - the professional grade, more expensive brand of gaff tape. It will arrive this weekend which means I get to spend the evenings of my in-service days re-hanging all the stuff I originally hung-up last week. And I have a roll and a half of moderately expensive tape that I will never use again.

Don't buy cheap tape, my friends. Stick with the professional grade.