It’s hard for me to type today because my fingers are sore and swollen. They got a little cut up during a recent situation.  In hindsight, it was a fabulously funny situation, but at the time, I wasn’t laughing.  And neither were my fingers.

I did some spring cleaning this week and I started in my home office. The result was a big stack of paper that needed shredded.  I’m not trying to hide anything with the shredding, but there was stuff on the paper that nobody else needed to see.  I decided to run all of it through my husband’s shredder. That’s when the situation started.

Directions on the shredder lid said eight-page max so I kept it to less than six just to be safe.  After feeding two or three sets of paper through the ‘shredder full’ light came on.  I stopped, emptied the plastic collection liner, reinserted it, and got back to business, or so I thought.

It seems I didn’t do a good job reinstalling the plastic liner into the shredder. Before I knew it, the jaws that were supposed to shred paper grabbed the plastic and pulled it in.  I couldn’t reach the off switch fast enough.  An awful sound and slight smell came from the machine.  After I finally pulled the plug, I removed the lid.  Plastic was wrapped around and around the jaw bar.  No, hold up.  That explanation doesn’t give justice to what I saw so let me try again. Plastic was wrapped around and around and around and around the jaw bar.  The 20-inch plastic liner was now about 7 inches in length. The other 13 inches were tightly wrapped around the 1-inch jaw bar-the one that has all the razor sharp teeth on it.  What the hell? Doesn’t a shredder shred plastic?  It can shred credit cards but it can’t shred a thin plastic liner that’s sold with it?  Who designed a shredder that uses a plastic liner that can’t be shredded by the shredder?

Needless to say, I knew the end was near but I wanted to try and resuscitate my husband’s shredder before he figured out what happened.  I gathered my magnifiers and surgical instruments including scissors, tweezers, and one of the steak knives I got for Christmas.  At first, I tried pulling on the plastic, but that only caused my fingers to bleed because I got a little too close to the razors.  Next, I used the tweezers to pull, but that didn’t work either.  After trying many different techniques, cutting first and then tweezing seemed to work the best.  So, for the next 90 minutes I cut and tweezed 13 inches of plastic from around the razors.  A pint of blood and a box of Band-Aids later, I finally removed thousands of pieces of plastic and I did it with surgical precision. I turned the damn thing on and it worked, but I had had enough so I cleaned up the evidence, did some first aid on my shredded fingers, and called it a day.

The next morning, I looked down the hall and saw the shredder peeking out at me from my husband’s office.  It seemed to be calling my name. Swollen, cut fingers and all, I decided to answer the call, conquer the beast, and finish the shredding job. I approached the machine, turned it on, and fed two pieces of blood-streaked paper through it. Everything seemed fine so I went for two more and then two more. I laughed as I recalled the previous day’s situation.  How silly I must have looked cutting and tweezing plastic with surgical precision and bloody fingers. But my laughter was quickly halted. The sound, the same sound I heard yesterday, came from the shredder.  I knew it wasn’t plastic because I didn’t put a liner in this time.  You can call me a lot of things but stupid isn’t one of them. I turned off the machine, removed the lid, and saw paper jammed so tightly into the jaws that no fingerless surgeon with any type of surgical instrument could remove it.

Let’s just say that the shredder is no longer peeking at me or anyone else. It’s going to the dumpster as soon as my husband gets home and has a chance to wave goodbye to it.  And me? Well, I’m laughing because I can’t wave… goodbye or anything else.

Thanks for reading and special thanks to those who have read over 90 #fabulouslyfunny stories about everyday life during the past year.  Tomorrow marks the 1-year anniversary of My Fruit of the Womb!  Remember to #sharethelaughter and brighten your every day!

Happy Anniversary!

Eliza G.