Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Ah, the makers of drugs must really get a kick out of their side effects. Even more so, their intended effects, such as “gas with oily spotting“. Alli sounds like a fun time, eh?

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I came across this delightful article while reading in a lawyer’s waiting room. Tomorrow I give him a mitt full of cashola just for some paperwork and advice. But it will be worth it :-)

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Yesterday while living the office life, I decided it was time to shred the papers that were piling up. I had about 40 to destroy, and I knew where a shredder was in a back room. I wandered over to it in the room by myself, and chose about 10 pages to make up the first pile to get sucked into the grinders. I overestimated the shredder’s hunger for paper; grossly overestimated it in fact.

The gears whined to a halt as the paper skewed to the right side. I turned it off, and tried to reverse it. Same noise, and pulling the paper out didn’t help. At that point someone else came into the room to find the source of the noise, and started offering advice on how to remove the paper jam. I opened the drawer, and they reminded me [unnecessarily] that I should unplug the machine before putting my hand under it.

I went over to the plug on the other side of a table while they looked on and fretted about the jam. I reached down and gave a gentle pull on the plug, but it didn’t budge on one side. I bent down further, remarking how stuck the cord seemed to be, and made sure to pull straight out so as to not bend the pins. The plug came out — minus a prong, which was still in the wall outlet!

I sheepishly held up the cord of the now royally broken and jammed shredder for the coworker to see, and they gasped. I explained the cord was easy to fix for cheap, and even I could do it. They naturally questioned the wisdom of having the person who broke the shredder, also attempt to fix it. “What if there’s a fire?” was one of the well intentioned, yet unhelpful remarks I think.

It was at this point that my supervisor happened to come into the room with the shredder, and witnessed the dead shredder with me hovering over it, pulling out bits of half eaten sheets. He reminisced about a time a coworker of his tried to unjam a paper shredder only to get their tie caught in the grinder. “Did they survive,” I asked? “They didn’t live through it,” my boss deadpanned. “Don’t you mean he didn’t live it down?” I quipped. “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

Then they started joking about Saskboy trying to shred a phone book. We laughed our butts off.