Shredder, You Idiot!!

I burned out my little 3-page strip-shredder a few weeks ago. Actually, I didn’t burn it out. I fed too many sheets to it one too many times and stripped its tiny plastic gears. Actually, I didn’t just strip the gears. I obliterated the gears. I opened it up to see if I could fix it, and one of them was really more of a white plastic disc than a gear. It was still a gear, of course, but only in the same way a kitten is still a kitten after being hit by a Mack truck.

So today I bought a medium-duty cross-shredder, and then I shredded everything. If you’ve never operated a shredder before, it’s really quite an experience. You sort of get into this trance-like state, a shredding frenzy if you will, and you start putting anything you can find down the mouth of the beast. After I had exhausted the credit-card receipts and statements, I moved on to credit-card junk mail. Then was my mobile phone statements, followed by ATM receipts. Next was old work information. Then it devoured a couple of actual credit cards. That’s when things started to get a little hazy. I just started grabbing things off my desk. Emails, printed MapQuest directions, post-it notes, photographs of loved ones, my college degree. I began pulling books off shelves, ripping the pages out, and destroying my library seven confetti-shredded pages at a time. Now that there’s no paper anywhere left in my apartment, and I’m fighting the urge to commend by underpants to the shredder’s gullet.

I really hope my birth certificate isn’t in there…