A sad shredder story

About 2 or 3 months after I graduated from college, I bought a shredder. It was a fine shredder, on clearance at Office Depot, marked down from $80 to $20 or $30. It would shred credit cards and 8 or so sheets at a time, and did a fantastic job. I remember the first time I used it, I had tons of papers stacked up and I just sat there on the living room floor of my apartment and shredded and shredded and shredded.

The shredder has served me well over the years. I shredded, Addy shredded, Christine shredded, Geoff shredded.

Sometime in the last 6 months, the shredder got sad. It started slowing down... paper got stuck all the time... in the last couple of weeks it would take 3 or more minutes to shred a single sheet of paper because it kept getting stuck, you had to reverse it, then try again... over and over and over. Sad shredder. I thought "but this shredder is brand new! This isn't right! How could it be THIS broken?" And then I remembered... for the 263986th time... that I graduated from college FOUR years ago. I have been out of college for as long as I was in college. The things that were brand new when I graduated aren't anymore. Even my beloved Jake the Jeep. Geoff gave the shredder a thorough inspection Tuesday night and discovered that only one side of the blades were rotating, and so every time the other side of the blades rotated around, it got stuck. EVERY ROTATION. No wonder I had to reverse it every 1/2 a second.

So last night we went to Office Max, Office Depot, and Target to get a new shredder. I was looking for another lovely clearance deal at the office supply stores, but there was not (well there were some... like $200 shredders marked down to $100 shredders). So we looked at Target and there were several good looking and reasonably priced shredders. We picked one out we liked but then Geoff said "but that's light duty!". I said "what kind of shredding do you think we'll be doing exactly? If we're not light duty with our 2 or 3 pages a day, I don't know who is!" And he said "good point :)". So we bought the shredder.

We took it home, set it up, and tested it out. AMAZING! It would shred anything! Many sheets, VERY fast, and very quiet. I love our new shredder. We were both looking around for MORE things to shred (before we used to just tear our names and senstive information off of papers so we would have less to shred). It is just so fun. What a difference a new shredder makes.

And that, my friends, is the happy ending to a sad shredder story. (well, I guess it's still sad for the old shredder which will be going to the dump with our old dishwasher)