Home Forums Discussions General Discussion And you thought I had no life!

OK, so I am looking online for paper shredders because the dinky Staples brand lasts about four days. Yeah, I know, why do we need a shredder if we are paperless? Good point.

Now, there are shredders out there that cost well over $5,000. I guess it can shred an actual oak tree. Now, I wasn't that stupid. I bought the model just below it for $4200. It was 10% off.

Anyway, I thought I would put "Commercial shredders review" in Google just to get some help. Do you know what popped up?

http://www.paper-shredder-reviews.com I was thinking consumer reports or reviews of office furniture. How in the hell can there be a website strictly for shredder reviews? OK, so here is the get a life part.

On the home page, the owner must have thought people would think the same way. So, he/she wrote:

You may wonder why Paper Shredder Reviews was created,
Let me tell you!

First and Foremost Shredding Paper is Fun! The noise and the destruction are always pleasing.

What? What else could be worse? Making reminder calls? By the way, the smiley face was copied and pasted from the site.

He has a point, shredding paper is soooooooo fuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnn

I think in Maine, you should just have a giant wood stove going all the time. Kill two birds with one stone.

Decrease your heating bill and you don't need the shredder.

FYI: Just so I don't get unnecessary posts, I didn't really buy the $4200 one.

I am out of here. Looking forward to the steak and beer and PRAYING there are no birthdays there tonight.

Hey come to think of it, there weren't any birthdays at the restaurant. It's the first time in a year I've been to a chain....and we were blessed with good times AND no annoying birthday celebration that no one wants to hear.

Buying a $4,000 shredder is something you would do, but you would pay the extra $$$ to have it over-nighted and let it sit in the box for 6 months before opening. A classic Bert-Adam maneuver.

That is true. I didn't even pick up on that. We hate the group of waitresses and waiters coming out and clapping and dancing to celebrate a person's birthday which is not only annoying it is highly embarrassing to most people. But, the funniest thing ever was when Adam and I went to a restaurant called the New Moon Cafe, which (for Bangor) is a fairly upscale restaurant where most meals end up in the $100 range. It was rather late, and there were only two tables left. Ours and another party. We had talked about how it was worth paying the money to get away from the annoying party line. And, we nearly died laughing when the New Moon Cafe staff marched out and did a birthday dance for the other table maybe 15 feet away from us.

Our landlord has horses and they use the shreddings to extend the straw for bedding, his wife is working on figuring out a way to go a bit more commercial. It is nice to have it go somewhere and be used.
Becky Preston
Rebecca955@aol.com

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.

My office dog, Buckley, a 2 year old Goldendoodle, shreds paper and cardboard into 1 inch squares.
But mostly, we use the heavy-duty shredder from Costco. We had one go out after 5 years of use, and Costco still replaced it!

Dave

We find it economical to use a shredding service ("Shredway") for most of our shredding. We just dump everything into the bin, and call them when it's full. Their shredding truck does not blink at staples, paper clips, etc., and they bring the truck to our office.

What is the price?

We also use a shredding service for a once a year purge.
In our area a 64 gallon bin is about $80.

On a day to day basis we have lightweight shredders at each desk for just a few pages.

I Googled a company, but they are in Boston. Most people have never heard of Brewer, Maine. In fact, we could probably just throw the paper out in the street, and it would be safe. The city probably wouldn't like it though.

Do you think they would service an area four hours away? Maybe they already come up here. Or maybe it depends on the schedule.

We could probably just throw it in the trash can and be fine too. Brewer doesn't yet know what HIPAA is.

Especially since Gary put a lock on the waste bin. Pain in the [censored], though.

There you go. Lock the trash, who needs a shredder?

Our patients eat their old records. Really. We are on a three-year project to shred old records. The shreddings go into my compost pile, will end up in the garden, ashes from other office papers are spread on top and we grow tomatoes that the patients can pick up at the front desk in season.

that is AWESOME

Campfire starter

Dr. Weiss, I love it!
Patient: "What do you mean, you can't find my EKG from 1990?"
Office staff: "We can't give you a copy, but we are fairly sure you ate it on a salad last summer".

Leslie, I thought you were going to say "mule bedding".

Jon,

I am howling!!! We have also used the excuse that "our basement (which is little more than a crawl space) flooded and your chart was one that could not be salvaged". I hate going down there...spiders and snakes and raccoon doo doo.

Dr. Weiss (do you have a first name we could use?), That is a great idea. Maybe we will start using them for chicken nest bedding and then sell the eggs here in the office.

That is so funny! I am trying not to burst out laughing in the office! I love this board - never disappointed. We use an Office Depot Ativa Vortex. It microshreds, is very quiet, and takes a lot of paper without overheating.

I'm sure this thread would give some lawyers heartburn!

Lawyers give me heartburn, I'd love to give some of it back....

I was surprised (and a little annoyed) to find that while the vast majority of the shredding in our office is done in front where snail mail is scanned, etc, it is in the back office where we have burned out shredders. My office manager proudly showed me the can of "shredder oil" that they run into the machine on occasion. (I would have asked why she was not sharing this tidbit with us in back, but I doubted I would have liked the answer).

A little oil is a good thing. so far a few hundred bucks from staples works good enough, but I would like one to sit on top of a trash compacter!.

Hire your own 10 year old kid, they LOVE Shreading paper and it keeps them busy and out of your hair on those days you can't do anything else with them...

Kitty litter

How much did it cost and how long have you been running it. Every one we had in our office lasted a few months. Then we had to stop and use more creative ways to destroy charts.

30 boxes of paper can take quite a while with a basic shredder. It'll likely overheat multiple times. Either you're going to want to call a commercial shredder or think of more clever methods of disposal, like burning (illegal in some states) or soaking. Hell, throw it in a wood chipper.