How important is shredding your documents before you throw them in the trash? Is that something you do? Do you ever think about it much? I am currently writing a blog post about a product on my other blog that made me think of a little story. It actually made me pay better attention to what I put in the trash.

Trash-TruckWhere I live, we have city issued trash bins that we put out on a certain day every week. If you have trash that doesnt fit in those bins, or larger items that needs to be thrown out, you can sit them on the curb in front of the house and  a different truck comes along to pick that stuff up. I’m usually pretty mindful of the days that second truck comes, mainly because the only time I put stuff out for that truck is when I cut the grass, or throwing out old furniture or something like that. I usually wait till the day before that truck comes before I put that out so there wouldn’t be junk in front of the house for days at a time.

Towards the end of the summer (07) I started cleaning out a lot of old things that I had no use for in preparation to sell my house. That cleaning left me with a lot of things I had to put out for that second trash truck. Old furniture, water heater, boxes etc. While doing that cleaning, I had a lot of important mail that I had been holding on to for one reason or another. It actually wasn’t important anymore, but I still had it (yea I can be a pack rat at times). I had a box with old magazines and books in it that had some space, so I took that old mail put it in a trash bag and stuffed it in that half full box of trash. The trash truck was coming the next morning so I put all of that stuff out by the curb.

After I was finished, and was watching a little television, I heard a vehicle in front of my house. I looked out the window and there was a man in a pickup truck picking up my old furniture and other things tossing it into the back of his truck. I was thinking “no big deal, its all trash anyway”. Then he grabbed that box that had my old mail. I rushed out and told the guy it was just trash. He said he knew and picked it up, starting to load it on his truck. I kindof panicked, thinking about all the personal information about me that was in some of those mail items. Account numbers, social security numbers, phone numbers. Pretty much a identity theft starter kit. I went out and grabbed the box away from him, and explained that I want the items in this box to go to the trash and that he couldn’t take it. He understood and went on his way.

Right then I looked at my hardly used shredder under my desk and thought “I better start using this thing”.