Ground Ice And Shredded Pork

Today I called my buddy Ken to see if he wanted to go for a coffee. I had been busy for the past few days and I was starting to worry that Tim Horton’s might just have to declare chapter 11 if I didn’t get there soon.

When he answered the phone he told me that he had a repair project on the go, so was busy for the foreseeable future. Instead of saying “Well, good luck with that.” and hanging up the phone, I asked what he was working on. There is a funny thing about asking someone a question, nine times out of ten you will get an answer! I know! You think I would have learned to keep my mouth shut in the past six decades or so.

It’s like when you ask a person how they are, the very last thing you want to hear is just how they are. I don’t care that you were up all night with a sick kid, or that you have a perforated bowel, or that it hurts when you do this. No one cares that the cat puked in your shoes and they were the only ones you had. Who only has one pair of shoes? I asked this woman how her day was once and not only did she start to tell me, but she began to cry. No one looks pretty crying, especially that guy when I asked how his sick dog was. It turns out that “Buttercup” died the night before. Oops! Just for your own information, telling a guy whose dog just passed, about all of the pets you have had over the years and how they died, just won’t make him feel any better. People are funny, not that guy of course, but some people are funny.

So anyway Ken told me that he was trying to repair a shredder that had stopped working. He could have used the back up shredder, but it turns out that it is also on the blink. We just got a new...ish shredder a while ago, which I could have loaned to Ken, but he just broke two already and I was reluctant to see if he would go for three.

I did say that I could bring over my collection of dental picks (don’t ask), which I used with pretty good success on my own shredder just a week or so ago. Ken said “Why not?” and I told him to put the coffee on, I would be over presently.

I cut up a large piece of meat into supper sized portions, watered the garden, collected the newspapers, went to the bathroom, took the meat down to the freezer, made the bed, opened the windows, loaded the dishwasher and went downstairs where I stood for a few seconds wondering why I was in the basement. Oh yeah, I need to get dog food. Back up the stairs for the small container and back down the stairs to fill it. Hmmmm....there is something else. The dental picks!

I get my wallet and keys and I lock the door and go to the garage. Ahhhh...crap! The magazines I borrowed. Back in the house and fetch the magazines. By this time Buster is outside and I have to threaten him in order to get him back in the house. Now what? Oh yeah, I am going to Ken’s place.

Once there we quickly realize that the picks are still too wide to fit the narrow gap. We did find out that there was another major unrepairable problem. The only thing to do in situations like this is to give up and have a coffee. Over coffee we were discussing how things aren’t really easy to repair anymore. Well, not by me anyways. They are actually designed to fail. The manufacturer also encourages the machines to break down by suggesting things that you can shred. Eight pages of paper, CD’s and DVD’s, staples, credit cards and if they thought that we were stupid enough they would suggest we shred branches and small trees. “You can even polish rocks with the XD-3200!”

I guess that the advertising is paying off. Ken tossed his two useless shredders and bought a much better one this afternoon. I think you can grind ice and shred pork with his new one, well at least for a month or two until it breaks down.