Of all the cool gadgets there are out there, many of which are strewn about my home, there is one that stands heads and shoulders above the rest - my shredder. After a hard day at the office, most (if not all) of us undoubtedly return home to a large stack of annoying junk mail promising to get us rich, save us a bundle on car insurance, or otherwise make us happy if only we'd part with our money and give it to the source of the correspondence. Anyone who's successfully emerged from their twenties surely knows what it means to suddenly become a marketing target for all things financial. Daily walks to the mailbox produce credit card applications four deep at a time, encouragement to drive the latest [insert automotive brand] car down at the local dealership for a chance to win $10,000 just for showing up, and life-altering sound financial advice from seasoned professionals enclosed in envelopes with the words "Important Financial Information Enclosed" printed in big red letters. It's like we get a little ticker tape parade welcoming us home every day, enough to drive us to want to tear every piece of mail to shreds in fits of frustration, but alas, there's just not enough energy, time or sheer will to do so.
That is, unless you own a shredder.
While not necessarily cutting edge technology (pun intended) in a world of dual-core computer processors and laser guided luxury sedans, a paper shredder empowers its owner in a
way nothing else can. Unfold and lower that credit card application into it's receptacle, marvel how it draws the paper into its maw: slowly, methodically, towards certain death. There's nothing like it! Take it a step further and visualize a particularly annoying coworker, miniaturized and taped to the paper's surface as it's drawn down into the grinding, crunching, whirring jaw of destruction. I can sit in front of my shredder for hours, or at least until all the day's junk mail is gone -- whichever comes first.So for anyone still pining away over what to get that special someone on your Christmas list, consider a paper shredder. Non-gender specific, it's the perfect gift for anyone who might enjoy a bit of controlled destruction with the added benefit of eliminating piles and piles of junk mail.
Merry Christmas, and happy shredding! Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a sizeable stack of Important Financial Information and the visual image of a miniature annoying boss that require my immediate attention.
7 comments:
Shredders are good check out http://www.shredjunkmail.com has an interesting twist on junk mail and also http://www.stopthejunkmail.com that has the ability to stop the stuff before it gets out of hand.
It's actually quite therapeutic to shred. -_-
Hi, Breathe. I came over from "Accountability is King," because your comments were sane and lucid. :-) Really, you understood my point, so I thought I'd check out your site. Feel free to drop by my blog anytime. I won't be returning to the blog above, because the animosity is just too strong. (How can I point out in a way they would grasp that my timing is hardly suspect, since that was the first time I had ever encountered the bad?)
Anyway, happy new year to you; now I need to go shred some stuff.
And a happy new year to you, too Prof.
I'm sorry about this but I can't help myself. You seem very excited about technology, and so I wonder if you can help me out. I've always wondered about how the internet works; and why websites let us use their services for free. Nobody I know seems to know about this. Can you please tell me?
Also, I apologise that this comment isn't about your blog. Sorry. I don't know much about technology.
No need to apologize. It's a good question, with multiple answers.
There are different reasons various sites let us use their services for free. In the case of blogger.com, the gracious host for which we rely on to host our blogs, it was an idea created to fulfill what the original founders saw as a need that may someday exist -- a need for people to publically post thoughts, daily diaries, political opinions, and spark discussion. Put another way, the founders of blogger.com realized what Andy Warhol had said -- in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. So they started the site, raised VC (venture capital money), and eventually sold their idea to google. Great way to make money, in my opinion! Google, being the recently made-public entity they are, still have a great philosophy of providing useful tools to users (email, toolbars, desktop searching tools, and blogger.com) because they are in my opinion just decent people. They make money off of their ads, which raises their stock price, which generates more capital, which is funnelled into projects like blogger.com or gmail.com. They have a different spin on how to advertise, they're against pop-up ads and banner ads, but if you want to see an example of how google makes money, type in a search for "Chevrolet", and look at the plain text ads on the side of the page, and also look at the blue highlighted ads at the top of the search results page. If you click one of those ads, you cause the advertiser to pay google a bit of money.
Other sites, like snopes.com to debunk a lot of the misinformation that is out there, and my.yahoo.com which lets us set up personal sites and even provides email services, and then there are enthusiast sites like vwvortex.com (I know the guy who started that site, now over 200,000 members strong which I currently moderate at!), want us to use their sites because they sell blocks of space at the tops and sides of their pages to banner advertisers, those blinking swooshing annoying things we see on most sites out there. Every time someone clicks yahoo.com, yahoo! gets a sum of money paid to them by the banner advertisers. It's not very much money, but multiplied by tens of millions of "hits" every day in the case of yahoo!, you can see why I'm still kicking myself for not buying yahoo! stock years ago.
Anyway, there are other reasons sites let us use their resources, but most have to do with some way to make money.
Hope that helps!
It did help. Thanks.
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