Why is it that churches keep pens and markers that are outta ink?

Every church I've been to (granted it's a small sample size) has a seemingly endless supply of useless pens and markers. And of course, they're all together in a canister or cardboard box somewhere. When I teach English at the church here, I use a white board... you know those dry erase boards. And there's this box that holds all the dry erase markers... along with a bunch of other junk like tiny broken pieces of chalk, dirty rags, small magnets, and broken colored pencils. In this box, there are probably about 10 dry erase markers. 4 are black, 3 are blue, 2 are red, and 1 is green. Does that add up? Yep.

Ok. So, of these 10 dry erase markers, only one works well. There's one fat black marker that works well. Good, continuous, dark streaks. The other ones? Dried out. Thin streaks. Weak color. But for some reason, we keep them. Maybe it's because they work well for the first stroke on the dry erase board. And it'd be wasteful, especially for a church, to throw away a pen that's still good for the first stroke of usage. It's always the same. I pick up one of the dry erase markers, start to write something (and it's good for a little while), and then of course it starts running outta ink real quick. So, instinctively, I put the cap back on, chuck it back into the box, and pick up another marker. This process goes on with the black markers until I find that one that's good. This happens everyday. When I put the bad markers back into the box do I think that they'll magically become good again? I dunno. And of course, I don't go to the local store and buy new dry erase markers because we have 10 dry erase markers in the box. Why would anyone need more than 10 dry erase markers?

Maybe I should change the initial question from "Why is it that churches..." to "Why is that Hideyo...". Just call me the bad dry erase marker savior.