the AOX

Hello,

Summer has now arrived. While I am a grad student, I also work full time in an office. It is ok, but it pays the bills. The office gets a little mundane during the summer as monotony sets in from the off-season. I oftentimes walk by our office shredder. It is perhaps the most curious device in our office. Surely the most dangerous as well.

There it sits, begging you to try it. When it first arrived about two years ago, I shredded everything. No piece of paper on my desk was spared from the paper holocaust that summer of 2007. Sometimes, I would even bring personal papers from home just to shred. I would stand there inserting each document steadily one by one. The unassuming consistent hum was like a Burgmüller string quartet; low in its rhythmic gaze, accompanied by an understated screech similar to the sound of a trolley grinding its brakes down a 35 degree incline. Of course, the nightmare of having my hand getting caught in it’s metal rigid teeth always crossed my mind and added a certain element of danger to this activity.  What is it about this wonderful machine of death? Is it because it is so cool and so calm with the smooth murderous stolidity of Kevin Spacey in a Fincher film? Well…..yes. That’s certainly part of it.

It then becomes impossible for me not to think about the fateful final scene in the Coen Brothers’ film “Fargo”? But that was nasty and unrefined. The shredder in my office is similar to that wood-chipper in function and potential, but with the sophisticated facade of a Dartmouth graduate who grew up in Westchester.

I have often wondered what it would be like to insert sugar packets into this machine. Sugar packets are surely more benevolent and their exploding nature might be a good visual. But, I like my job. And, I can’t think of a clever way to explain my need to insert tens of sugar packets into the shredder to watch them explode. No spin is available. Sugar is unneeded in the teeth and gears.