ring around the roses...

My wedding ring is gone...

But I was very VERY fortunate to walk away with all that I did.
At work the other day, Laura and I were shredding old deposit tickets. The shredder that we were using is brand new, industrial size... It's capable of completely demolishing anything from plastic to paper to disks.

BUT, it gets jammed up a lot.

Normally all you have to do is turn the power switch off and pull the clogged paper/ plastic out from underneath the metal shredding teeth. Even though you have to do it completely by touch it usually only takes about ten minutes. Not a big deal, I've done it many times before and nothing bad has ever happened.

Well, while Laura and I were shredding tickets, the machine gets junked up with plastic. Ok, not a big deal. Laura was having back trouble that day so I turned off the shredder, knelt down in front of it and stuck my hand inside of the beast (by the way, the little logo/ mascot for this shredder is a giant bulldog with a spiked collar, growling with giant sharp teeth, it's more fitting than you can imagine).

So I stick my left hand up inside of the machine and carefully feel around the very sharp, stainless steel teeth and start picking out the hunks of plastic and paper. I had almost finished cleaning out between the teeth and I bumped something with the tips of my fingers...
Before I realized what was happening there was a loud metal clank and two rows of sharp stainless steel teeth crashed into the back of my hand, pinning my hand inside of the shredder. Doing my best not to panic I tried to wiggle my hand out of the teeth, wasn't going to happen... one of the teeth was shoved up between my finger and my wedding rings.

At this point Laura is freaking out and goes and grabs Danny, one of the controllers, and they are trying to figure out how to get my hand out. Now, none of the three of us can actually see into the machine because my body is blocking the inside of the shredder and when you lift up the top, all you can see are two or three of the many rows or rotating teeth. We tried for about fifteen minutes to get my hand free, but nothing worked because no matter what I did I had a giant metal tooth between my finger and my wedding ring. At this point my hand is falling asleep from lack of bloodflow, and I'm beginning to freak out. Finally, we all came to the decision that I had to get the ring off my finger, otherwise we'd probably have to call 911, and that would cause panic and rumors and the paramedics would probably have to separate my hand from my ring anyways.

So Danny grabbed the squirt bottle of oil that we fill the machine up with and he starts spraying it through the teeth on the top and I can feel it slipping through onto my fingers and hand. Immediately I start wrenching my hand in every way to try and find a way to get the ring off of my finger and eventually it works. Slowly my ring slips off my finger, staying hooked to the metal teeth.

After I pull my hand and arm out Danny gets underneath the shredder with a flashlight to try and see if he can knock my ring loose... No luck. He said that the space that my hand slipped through was so small that he couldn't believe my hand actually came out at all, and he couldn't even see my ring.

So, we decide to turn it on, hoping that the ring is towards the bottom of the shredder and that when the teeth rotate it would just fall out onto the floor.

Great idea in theory, but it didn't work out that way. For whatever reason my ring took about ten seconds to come out and when it finally did it was broken into a couple different pieces, gashed, dinged, and scratched to beyond recognition. The only thing that wasn't completely destroyed was the diamond.

After that, I took the pieces back to my desk and sat and thanked God for letting me keep my fingers.

Thankfully, I'm married to one of the sweetest men on earth, and Jordan wasn't mad at all. The first thing he said was "We can replace it. Thank God you didn't hurt your hand."