I got a shredder for Christmas and spent this weekend grinding away. The results so far are three large trash bags of .... fluf?... shred? whatever.
Some observations:
1. With a home-size shredder, just having the shredder doesn't mean you can just charge on, non-stop. First off, the trash container needs continual dumping. Second, if you don't dump often enough, it backs up into the grinder and starts plugging up.
2. Home shredders seem to be made to manage a light maintenance workload, rather than eliminating 40 years of paper. Mine shuts down (built in heat shut off) every 10 minutes of continuous grinding. Then it sits 15 minutes plus to reset. Once I get the backlog load gone, though, and can use it for a little now and then, it will work fine.
3. It is uber-strange going back through 40+ years of paper work. Saturday I shredded the first checks I'd ever written, from back in 1968. As I went through them, it was like a time-trip, recalling every different place I've lived since then. There were so many nostalgic things, that they became an issue themselves: the hospital bill for my first son's birth, $5 checks to the airport I learned to fly at for an hour's flight time, old Army orders, many, many, many written to the local college liquor store.
4. As shredding goes on - and on - and on... one becomes more focused as to what is really sensitive... and what isn't. By last night, rather than shredding entire pages of ten years of utility bills, I found myself tearing off only the corner, or the top, or side, that had names and account numbers on them. Grind that and toss the rest.
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