Shredder scam
So I’m buying a paper shredder at Office Max. The sales-weasel tries to upsell me to a heavy duty shredder, then he starts telling me how important it is to lubricate the shredder regularly with a specially formulated shredder oil. Shredder oil? I never oiled my old shredder. Maybe if I had, it would have lasted longer than 10 years. My bad. Then he tells me that the oil is kinda messy, and what I really need is some convenient shredder lubricant sheets, only $9.99 for a pack of 14. Note that this is an order of magnitude more expensive per application than squirting a few drops of oil.
And what exactly is shredder oil, anyway? From the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS):
But not just any vegetable oil! This is oil from vegetables that have been genetically engineered to produce oil with exactly the right viscosity for maximum shredder performance.
September 7th, 2009 at 7:47 am
Dan: The price really is remarkably cheap when you consider that, while the oil is indeed essential for Peak Shredder Performance (PSP), it’s vegetableness makes it the perfect dual use Personal Modular Energy Reserve Supply (PMERS) in case we experience the imminent Total Social Collapse predicted since the 1970s. Shred with it, cook with it, drink it, fill your oil lamp with it, run your rice grinder on it. Experience the same performance the Pentagon experiences…tho they get a 10% discount for tanker load orders.
I hope you wouldn’t try that with mere Mazola.