On board ship (circa 1984), the comm-center had a cross-cut shredder that looked like someone had stolen it off a trailer of an arborist - as big as a table, with a maw that was scary-big once you fired it up and the blades were spinning.
Big as it was, the guys in radio would burn out the enormous electric motor that drove the beast. One of my Divisions were the Electricians, so we were regularly up there replacing the motor, bearings, and picking paperclips, binding clips, and even pens out of the blades when it would bind up.
My guys were of the opinion that they were trying to break it on purpose so that they didn't have to do the classified shredding, and I got contacted by someone in the supply system to determine if the motors were actually being used, or were they being sold black market.
Eventually my Chief Electrician took things into his own hands, and asked if he could deal with it personally. Never asked where he got it, but he came back to the ship with a motor so big that it took chain-falls to get it into the comm-center. They never broke it after that while I was on-board, but people in the forward part of the ship used to complain that the superstructure shook when they started up the shredder, and they started having to run it when the Old Man wasn't in his rack.
