Shopping

I managed to break our shredder a couple of days ago, by feeding it two theatre tickets at once. Bits of the tickets got jammed in the middle, where the sensor which works the automatic feed lives. I tried to take the thing to pieces to see what was wrong, but failed to get beyond clearing the bits of the tickets away and tipping out a quantity of very fine debris which had accumulated in the roller and cutter compartment over years of happy shredding. The all important roller and cutter assembly declined to be taken to pieces, despite the presence of various promising looking nuts. Not, I imagine, that I would ever have got it back together again - but it would have been interesting to see how it was all put together.

First stop, Amazon, who sell a great variety of the things, varying in priced from £20 to £200, but I did not care to buy without touching.

Second stop, Rymans, who had maybe half a dozen shredders which one could touch. They offered a choice card to help with choice but I did not find it helpful; they all seemed to be much the same.

Third and last stop, Office Outlet, which I learn is the shop part of what used to be Staples, with Staples now just doing the online stuff. Did the two sons of Mr. Staples have a row and decide to part company? It seemed to me to be an odd thing to do, thinking that the online and shop side would work better together - just like us and the EU. At least we will see how the Epsom shop works out.

They had lots of shredders, all cross cut, with the ribbon cut of the broken shredder seeming to be a thing of the past, mostly made in China for a US company called Fellowes, but with a sprinkling from a German company called Genie. They may have been made in Germany, but I failed to find anything which said so - and the website that bing turns up at reference 1 suggests that they are a distributor and wholesaler as much as a manufacturer - so who knows where the stuff is made. But different, I think, from the Genie which is owned by Terex, a US corporation which is mainly into lifting and materials handling.

But yesterday, sticking with the made in Germany theory, I plumped for Genie and a domestic product with the smallest number of slots and switches. My bit to support manufacturing in Europe.

Now up and running, with maybe 20 shredded pages to its credit. I have also been perusing the multi-lingual instruction booklet.

I learn, for example, that in German, French and Spanish you have to say both 'Dear Mr. Customer' and 'Dear Mrs. Customer', while English and Italian allow a single unisex greeting. Odd that we should be brigaded with the Italians in such a matter.

Also that you should not use the shredder for more than 2 minutes in 60, otherwise the shredder will be shut down for 60 minutes. The choice card in Rymans had suggested that a limit of this sort applied to all the domestic shredders. So maybe it takes the big hike in price to get to the office shredders which gets over this one - which would not do in an office at all. In any event, not a rule that I had known about and I am sure that it is a rule that I have broken from time to time in the past. Maybe all part of the wear and tear which culminated in the theatre ticket collapse.

There is at least one hangover from some previous life, with the first instruction telling you to mount the shredder on top of a waste paper bin. So much for the thorough ways of German manufacturing.

While another instruction talks about cleaning the drip tray. Unfortunately there is no diagram, so I am unsure whether the drip tray means the large plastic container for the shredded paper or not.

We shall see how we get on.

PS: although I started off baffled by choice, I could not be bothered with reading Which reports and such like. Did not seem worth my valuable time for a piffling £35. Complete mystery to me how such things can be made and sold for so little.

Reference 1: http://www.gerth-gmbh.de/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/data-protection.html.