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[10:01] The Shredder
EVERYTHING that comes through the post box in this country seems to be personally addressed to me, even the junk mail! Bills turn up consisting of four pages, one with the bill and three with advertisements, each with a full name and address emblazoned across the top. Identity theft has become such a problem here in the UK that there's an entire website devoted to it (although it's run by a mob calling themselves the "Home Office Identity Fraud Steering Committee" which makes it sound like they're the ones behind the whole caper) and there are little stickers and posters all over the place exhorting constant vigliance.
With this in mind I've finally procured a shredder, this one to be exact. It's a cross-cut shredder that spits out confetti in the shape of 4x36mm rectangles. Cross-cut shredders are basically strip shredders (your standard "cut paper into ribbons" style shredder) but with an extra cutting edge that cuts each strip into about 7 pieces (assuming you fed it an A4 sheet). The cross-cut seemed like a better idea because it's pretty easy to put the ribbons back together if there's not too many of them. I actually had a go at piecing some of the stuff I shredded back together and I've dicovered that you should definitely shred from top to bottom rather than edge to edge. Edge to edge means that you end up with strips of sentence and I managed to put my name and address back together easily! I also heard a tip on the In The Trenches padcast that suggested sealing half a cup of milk in a bag with your shreddings and leaving them in the sun for a day before disposing of them but I'm not so sure if I need to go to such extremes just yet...
[Posted at: 09/05/2006 18:01]