Slowly does it

There's great pleasure to be had from doing things slowly but very thoroughly, such as clearing out one's study prior to redecorating and re-arranging furniture. On Friday night, I must have shredded a whole filing cabinet full of old data-sensitive papers. When I looked up, it was almost morning. I hadn't noticed, ensconced in the middle of the room amongst piles and boxes of stuff.

It had actually taken me awhile to get the shredder going. The shredder is one of those 5-pages-tops-or-I'll-go-on-strike merchants and I hadn't used it in years so when I clicked the button to "on", it wouldn't shred. It would rotate backwards but not forwards.

"Why is it rotating backwards but not forwards?" I shouted upstairs accusingly, for it was OH's shredder, and he always buys cheap office stuff that never works, not for me anyway, like that laminator, for example, that doesn't laminate but merely casually introduces two clear plastic foils to each other.

"It's probably jammed," came the patient reply.

Alright, I thought, I hadn't even got started and the shredder was already jammed. I spent the next fifteen minutes of a Columbo episode dismantling the shredder and scratching paper out of its jaws with a knife. Then I put it back together. On my laptop, Faye Dunaway was blowing air into Peter Falk's ear, by way of seduction. It was almost midnight.

I clicked the on switch. Nothing happened. I had enough. On my laptop, Peter Falk brought Faye Dunaway red roses.

"It's STILL not working," I shouted upstairs. OH knows that that's as good as an order and he duly clomped downstairs. On my screen, Faye Dunaway was buying Peter Falk a new tie and kept smiling seductively as she adjusted it, in a knowing, post-menopausal sort of way.

I showed him the offending, not-working, probably British-made, certainly not German-made item. OH took one look at me sitting in the middle of chaos like an angry toddler well past her bedtime, grabbed a piece of scrap paper and fed it into the slot. The shredder whirred to life and chewed up the paper.

"Did you actually put any paper in it?"

"Er, no."

"There's a little plastic switch in the feed slot. When you push the paper in, it tells the machine to start shredding but not before."

"I see."

"You've used this thing before!"

"Yes, but I've obviously forgotten the LAST BIT!"

OH laughs like a hyena and goes back upstairs to his computer game. 

On the screen, Peter Falk is clicking handcuffs around Faye Dunaway's slender, murderous wrists.

I shred furiously until 2am until the machine overheats and conks out for the night. I'm nowhere closer to sorting out the room. I've merely created a sackful of cellulose for the compost heap. But I've got the whole weekend ahead of me.