Oceans 11. The original. Never get cocky. Always do one’s research 🤣 Dean Martin’ chocolate herringbone with white shirt. Hmmm

I have a 146 and the grand poohbah 149 Montblanc Meisterstruck pens. I love fountain pens and almost always carry one in my chest pocket. The 149 was purchased early in 2026 and I had them switch it to a double-wide pen. My 146 is a fine nib so I wanted the opposite experience. When you do this at purchase, the nib is free as is the process of changing it over. Normally, these gold/iridium nibs are about $350 and the cost can be a few hundred to change them, as they get sent to Germany and are done by their team of Meisterstruck experts. I have received the 149 back from their Germany team... twice. It's off to them again. Ink flow is horribly inconsistent. My $20 Pilot fountain pen operates WAY better than this $1300 pen. My sales' person at Montblanc pulled me aside on Saturday when I brought the pen back to the store again. She noted that nearly all of the expert staff retired, or put in for retirement, shortly after COVID. The new generation are reportedly poorly trained and she has had similar issues to my pen with 6 different customers, with pens ranging from $800 - $20,000 in cost. I cannot verify her claims, so do not take this as gospel. That said, if you are considering buying a Montblanc pen, be sure it comes with the nib you want and test it thoroughly in the store. Alternatively, go to a well-regarded pen reseller and buy a used Montblanc until this gets sorted out. This reduction in quality and skill matches with other areas of Montblanc, like their leather products. They switched from very high quality leather to horrible quality leather (there is a guy on YouTube the rips open leather products to review the quality and all of the new MB products have gotten panned). This is truly sad, as MB has stood for quality for over 100 years.