What the fuck is PC Load Letter?

Today, the stationery man delivered me some new stationery. Yes, yes, it was very exciting. It was a shredder. You know, the paper kind, which sits over your bin and shreds pieces of paper into unreadable* strips of paper. Natch, I need to try it out straight away. I have some paper on hand (confidential documents, darling- no, no, you can’t look) that has been waiting around specifically for the shredder to arrive. I plug in the shredder and turn it on. I put in the first piece of paper.

It gets stuck. I switch the shredder to reverse and most of the paper comes out. Some paper doesn’t come out. I flick the switch a few times. It’s jammed.

For about half an hour, I sit on the floor with the shredder, trying to remove the stuck pieces of paper with a paperclip. I am unsuccessful. Finally, I shame-facedly ask for help (having broken yet another piece of office equipment.) All the boys clamour to prove their manliness by being able to fix the shredder. None of them are manly enough.

After the regrettable laminator incident, I am not brave enough to tell the stationery man about the shredder. I scurry past him across to infrastructure to borrow a screwdriver. It’s too big. I try pressing all the buttons at once, scrunching my eyes real tight and hoping like hell that when I open them it will be fixed. Nothing seems to work.

As a last resort, I take the shredder over to infrastructure, and one of the boys labours over it, painstakingly removing the teensiest scraps of paper with a very tiny, slim screwdriver. He blows into it a few times. He hands it back and it is unjammed. He rocks and I promise him that I won’t jam it again.

I take the shredder back to desk to complete my shredding. I feed a piece of paper through. It jams.


*Not technically true, as I have known someone to go through the shredder and stick a whole piece of A4 paper back together after they accidentally shredded it.