One of the most interesting things about working with a bunch of different office equipment is that you get to see the different ways that tools get classified and defined. To the average person, your basic office shredder is a paper shredder without a lot of differences between one model and the next. To someone who has the job of classifying business shredders, the differences are huge.
Or rather, they are small. You see, paper shredders are defined and classified by the size of the paper that they shred. There are two basic types of shredders - cross cut shredders and strip cut shredders. Strip cut shredders are measured by the width of their strips whereas cross cut shredders are measured by both the width and length of the cut.
There are six different levels of shredders. The first three are strip cut shredders. A level one shredder cuts in twelve millimeter strips whereas a level two shredder will cut in six millimeter strips and a level three shredder will have strips as thin as two millimeters. The other four shredders are cross-cut shredders with decreasing paper sizes that are inversely proportional to their security level. A level four shredder is two millimeters by fifteen millimeters; the pieces get smaller after that.