Shredding

I have just spent 1.5 hours of my precious life opening, shredding, unclogging, and coaxing junk pieces of paper into bits for one reason -- FEAR.

I am afraid to put these papers in the trash. Someone might steal my trash and thus steal my life. My money. My identity. My good name.

This is crazy.

I thought there was a recession on. I thought no one could get credit. So would someone please tell me WHY we get 2 to 4 new credit card notices a day?

When I was little, our dad would watch TV and explain the marketing techniques to us during the commercials. I ate that stuff up.

Today as I was shredding (that was before I got the thing overheated AND jammed, the second and final time) I watched those marketing techniques go down the shredder.

"You've been selected" to pay our exorbitant interest rates.
"You deserve it!"

And, the bane of all my existence, the "checks." Sometimes Discover includes them with our bill and sometimes they just send them separately.

The checks are so nefarious because they would make you feel like you're doing something very normal -- writing a check. Except in this case, the money is not yours, so you will pay interest. But by their "normalizing" it -- making it seem just like an everyday occurrence, you may not remember it's going to cost you big time.

So I watched these papers go down the shredder, and the seconds ticked by on the clock. It was all one giant metaphor for my life going past.

When we buy a shredder, (and yes, we've bought more than one in our 15 years of marriage,) we always buy the best one we feel we can afford. That way, we haven't overspent, but maybe, maybe, we have gotten a good quality one that will serve us well and last a long time.

That's our general philosophy on buying everything we get.

This shredder is rated for 10 pages per pass. I say with any shredder, divide the number by 2 and subtract 1. This particular shredder sounds happiest when it's processing 4 sheets of paper.

R-r-r--r-r-r-r-r- it happily chews up the papers.

I tried putting in a whole pad of the Discover checks: the outside says there are 8 and there are papers on the front and back: 10 sheets of narrow paper all together.

Ng-ng-ng-ng the shredder is singing slowly and sotto voce.

Then it stops.

I hit "reverse" and "forward" as long as I can until it grinds to a total and complete stop.

I opened the bay (must unplug to get it to open, safety check, tyvm.) and find although the bin is not full, all the ditritus from the shredding is jammed up there in the blades.

So I dig it out with my bare fingers. Remember it's unplugged.

The first time DH ever did this, I was frightened. Worried that the blades could disengage and chew up more of his fingers.

But it did fine for him so now I dig in with impunity. (Forgot to check, but I do NOT think there is such a word as "punity." Just saying.)

Did this once, did not run through a whole book of checks again, but it clogged again and now that I've unclogged it again, it just won't run at all.

I tend to toss shred things onto the shredder and save them up just because I hate the noise of the thing. I think in the future I'll shred things day by day, one or two things at a time, and avoid the trauma of doing a huge job.