a garbage disposal with a respiratory ailment
Written: May 27 '01 (Updated May 28 '02)
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Pros: not too expensive; destroys Capital One ads and whiny appeals for money
Cons: drowns out punk rock groups; doesn't fit together right
The Bottom Line: decent crosscut shredder, provided you don't expect too much or use it too often
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| jkkelley's Full Review: Fellowes P400C-2 Shredder |
What do Mother Jones magazine, Bird Talk magazine, Utne Reader magazine and PC Magazine all have in common?
a) I get them all, and b) they all cause reams upon reams of crap to be mailed to me. I have proof.
Since I take Mojo, I'm assumed to be a rubber stamp for every left-wing cause there is. Since I take Bird Talk, I must have a very thick wallet, ready to open up and blindly send money to the Save The Starling Foundation (or whomever). Since I take Utne, I hear from the pink tanks and various New Age groups, all of which start out by praising my deep-thinking, philosophical nature. (I usually put down my MAD magazines, or my hyperviolent Edge westerns, to read these appeals.)
And since I get PC Magazine, I'm apparently assumed to be stupid enough to buy almost anything Ziff-Davis cares to throw at me. (The fact that I continue to get PC Mag in the first place does, I admit, render their assumption not entirely groundless.) I even get catalogues for Compaq computers, if you can imagine that. That's like the Aryan Nations sending their book catalogue to the Anti-Defamation League. Compaq is not my friend.
And that's to say nothing of the credit cards, especially the ones that really suck. Capital One--once proclaimed by an Epinionator as The Official Credit Card of Satan (go look it up, and let's keep the revenue flowing to whomever wrote that essay). Providian. Wachovia. MBNA ('More Buffaloing Now Available').
Finally, there are the 'balance transfer checks' from my own banks and credit unions. I never asked for these. Why am I getting them? You and I know why I'm getting them. The same reason you're probably getting them: intelligent money management, defined by the credit card companies as 'not being maxed out'. I don't mind shredding old deposit slips and credit card receipts, because those resulted directly from my actions, but I mind having to shred junk I never asked for.
In the old days I used to mail all their garbage back to them in the business reply envelopes, along with whatever other trash I got in the mail that day. I had to packing-tape some of them. Do you know what it costs to mail an inch-thick letter? Capital One, I assure you, has some idea. With a little luck I've cost them, and many other credit card companies, hundreds of dollars. It raised important revenue for the US Postal Service. I'll just quietly hum the US national anthem now, here in my last refuge.
When I set forth to buy a shredder I hadn't realized how limited the selection would be, nor how deadly dull the reviews would be. Of course, I can't blame the authors. What's so exciting about shredders?
Freedom, above all. The creation of good kindling. Excellent packing material that's a lot more environmentally conscious than styrofoam. The feel of the machine viciously jerking a Capital One solicitation from your hands and into the blades. A new gadget. I ask you: is there anything here not to like? Shred and be free!
The P400C is a crosscut shredder, and it's not all that great a one, but it does the job for me.
Capacity: it'll handle about four sheets of paper at a time, which means you'll have to open the mail in order to shred it. Too bad. It comes with a plastic garbage can that fits poorly enough with the shredder for me to question the basic intelligence of the engineering people at Fellowes--either that, or I've got a deformed can. If you overload the shredder, it gets stuck and you have to reverse it.
Results: the end result is little pieces of paper about 3/16" x 1 1/4" (say, about 5mm x 40mm). Depending upon how the paper was fed in, you can sometimes make out some words. It got groany when I tried four sheets at once, but it shredded them.
Safety: underneath the shredder unit, the roller and cutters are bare. When you lift the unit out of the can, a red light goes on. Intrigued, I tried shredding with it out of the can--no go. It apparently has a detent switch for safety purposes--a good feature.
Power: this unit should be pretty economical to operate on the grounds that you leave it powered on, but it isn't doing much; the drum is started by the presence of something to shred, and the rest of the time, it just sits there. There is no 'on' light--the switch is either 'on', 'off' or 'reverse'. That's all.
Racket: you can't talk on the phone while shredding stuff, that's for sure. Sounds like a 5-pack-a-day-smoking garbage disposal when it's shredding, though it's dead silent the rest of the time.
Website: when I tried to go to their website for official specs on it, I found it amusing that the part about 'shredders' locked up my browser, and I couldn't reverse it. (I had, needless to say, refused their cookies.) So I'll have to improvise from my research when I bought it: I recall it to have a fairly limited duty cycle, probably less than an hour a day. It does not shred staples (or at least it's not supposed to, and I'm not in the mood to risk wrecking it).
By 'crosscut shredder', what is meant is a shredder that creates little short pieces rather than long stringy pieces--sort of the difference between macaroni and spaghetti.
Overall: this is a home or home office shredder, not an industrial one. It's not too expensive, and it seems to work for basic needs.
And it's safer than just mailing all that sewage back to the people who dumped it on you, on their nickel.
Recommended:
Yes
Purchase Price (if leased, monthly payment): 80
Machine age (Months in use): 3
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Epinions.com ID:
jkkelley
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Location: Ana-Tolia
Reviews written: 79
Trusted by: 308 members
About Me:
Farewell, Mr. Grover.
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