March 2005

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This entry got started about 6:00 p.m. on the floor on the other side of Kathy's desk. Wendy and I were doing the shredder thing again, and it got funny. It got funny in the sense that it's better to laugh about some things than to weep.

Earlier in the week, we had had some more trouble with the shredder jamming. I mentioned the aluminum foil cure (you know, the one where you cut through aluminum foil to cure scissors of dullness), and we decided to try that. So Wendy brought in some foil, and I offered to do the honors.

But first I had to get the latest jam out of the machine. Something was keeping the part of it that does the cross-cutting from doing its thing, so instead of getting small bits of paper, we were getting large chunks of paper with interesting holes punched in them. So item one was de-chunk the shredder. I set to work doing just that, with needle-nosed pliers and a trashcan as my weapons of choice.

With the de-chunking done, I started with the foil. Which shredded beautifully, so I thought we had just been dealing with a dull blade. I gave the shredder several more mouthfuls of foil, which it took quite happily. Then we tried a piece of paper. The shredder let it be known that it didn't want any part of that. It did the chunk thing again.

By this time, Wendy had come out of her office to play, too. She decided it was her turn to de-chunk, so I handed over the pliers and sat back out of the way. Eventually, I thought it might help to have the vacuum cleaner pull some of the paper from hidden spots. Wendy agreed, so she got it out of the storage closet and set to work. I sat down beside her, at this point, and kept up with the various tools, since the pliers had been joined by an unbent paper clip and a flashlight.

We made lots of surgery jokes, a few dentistry jokes, and uttered more than a few curse words. Wendy got a lot of paper bits out of the various parts of the shredder with the vacuum cleaner. Every once in a while, we'd stop and replace the shredder bin, so we could run it in reverse for a few seconds to see what else Wendy had managed to dislodge.

After each reverse session, the blades wound up in a different position. This let Wendy find more and more bits of paper that were seemingly glued to the blades. She would pick them loose, then either pull them out with the pliers or restart the vacuum to get them.

This process went on for a while, then we realized that it was truly getting late and that if needed we could reconvene on Monday. So it was time for the cleanup, to vacuum up the bits of paper that were all over the floor. And there was one last bit of vacuuming after the floor was clean.

I used the soft brush attachment of the vacuum cleaner to get the bits of paper off the back and sleeves of Wendy's sweater. Which she was wearing at the time. It was much more efficient than using the lint roller.

And on that note, we returned the tools to their proper places and left for the weekend.