I quite like buying toys.

I can spend literally hours browsing gadget and electrical shops looking for something cool to buy. I am a sucker for flashing lights and techno-babble I do not understand.

Iin this particular instance however, my toy was a little more low-tech.

I bought a paper shredder.

You would think this was a simple task, but you would be wrong. There are lots of paper shredders to shred your paper, and if you do not want borderline autistic identity thieves to piece all of your information together like a big jigsaw puzzle in order to get at your Tesco Clubcard points, then you have to get a certain type of cross-shredder.

My previous anti-identity theft tactics had been completely fool proof. I simply avoided throwing away anything with my name on it. I have boxes and boxes of bills, statements, application forms, letters etc. None of which I will ever want, or need to see again, but I was too scared to throw them out. What if a master criminal got hold of them and convinced the world they were me? Fortunately, I have never heard of an identity thief breaking into peoples lofts to get at old bank statements, so I thought it would be fine.

Actually, my shredder is pretty cool, as shredders go. Unfortunately, there are only so many times you can watch a batch of eight (yes, eight!) sheets of paper being sucked into the cutting mechanism before you get quite bored by it. The amount of times the the equivalent of the number of sheets in a quarter of a box of paper (divided by eight, yes eight!), in fact. Which is not very much when you have just over six boxes to shred.

One cool feature it does have though, is a safety mechanism which stops the cutters if a human finger gets too close. And also other animal fingers I imagine. What I do not understand is why I keep testing this safety feature. I know it works. It has worked every time I have tried it (0ver 50 as a conservative estimate).

If, just once, it doesn’t work, I am going to lose a digit. All because I want my new toy to seem a bit more interesting. I have no idea how I would explain such an incident.

“Oh dear, did you lose that finger shark diving in South Africa?”

“Ouch, did that get ripped off saving that child from the burning car?”

Or

“You lost it trying the safety feature on your paper shredder? For the eighty seventh time? What was it about the first eighty six times that led you to believe you needed just one more test?”

I do still have ten digits, for clarification, but I have no idea how long this will remain the case. I simply can not stop myself. I think perhaps I need help.

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