The MOST Fun You'll Ever Have Reading a Review of an Office Shredder...

For all our talk about Voice Over being a business, I often find it's those business-y elements which get passed over for all the sexy talk about microphones and performance. What about filing your taxes? What about managing your invoices?

What about protecting your sensitive information?

Yup. In my role as gadget reviewer, it's time to talk about some office equipment. I’m not totally nerding out on you guys though, because this particular piece of office gear just so happens to mulch up your documents in a very satisfying way…

Shredders aren’t something you think about when you’re younger and ruining your credit (like I did in college), but as you get older and start building some real purchasing power, you suddenly get hounded with offers, pre-approved, on a near daily basis.

You also might be dealing with sensitive personal information that you don’t want falling into the wrong hands. I’ve been pretty paranoid about that since my identity was stolen, and they didn’t even do anything cool with my ID! They used it to get a job at McDonalds… Who does that?

The Swingline Stack & Shred 80x is more than happy to oblige your personal paranoid tendencies!

The S&S80X is a large sucker, at least it’s big compared to our old crappy shredder. It belongs under a computer desk, in a near permanent place of honor. The S&S can shred manually via a top slot, or by a top loading tray, where the shredder gets its “Stack & Shred” moniker, and it earns its “80X” by being able to tackle 80 page jobs at a time.

This thing will tackle staples, paper clips, credit cards, even CD’s! you start looking for things to throw at it. You start thinking of starting a new gadget destruction site like “Will it Blend” (FYI, the Droid RAZR isn’t thin enough to be fed through an S&S80X).

Features are pretty great. The unit has automatic jam recovery, reversing and re-shredding until it completes the job. This is pretty handy, as you’ll be shredding quite a bit to fill the Swingline’s five GALLON capacity bin. A recyclable bin liner is included, and you’re supposed to buy more bin liners, but honestly I just kept reusing the included one to transfer to paper grocery bags.

Perhaps my favorite “feature” is how quiet the unit operates. Our old shredder would screech through individual pages. The S&S80X surely isn’t silent, but creates a nice rumbling sound. The kind of rumble which lulls you into a comfortable confidence that no one will apply for a fast food job using your social ever again…

To put it to the test, my Wife and I took out our bags of mail with sensitive info in them. Yes. Bags. Quick side note, Chase, Citi, and BofA send me DAILY offers for credit cards. DAILY. I’ll NEVER do business with you. STOP SENDING THEM!

Anywho, over the course of one afternoon in front of the TV, we took care of mail that had been building up for a year.

The S&S does not like having different kinds of paper shredded together, like glossy inserts next to newsprint style paper. The only times we had to manually clean up jams was during mixed paper shreds like that.

We also managed to get the unit to over heat three times. That’s REALLY impressive since this thing is not supposed to be run full time for a whole day. Our old shredder would lock up after about 30 minutes of constant use. The S&S80X wrapped up our shredding like a champ.

This is an easy recommend folks. In two years we replaced our low end shredders three times. Which is about what you would pay for the Stack & Shred, and suffer a LOT less hassle to boot. This really is a great addition to a home, small home office, or even a small office work group inside a larger company.

AND, I made it this whole review without making a TMNT joke...

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