Office
Articles
New Year’s Resolution- Be
Destructive!
Whether an individual or a
business, by this time of the year, you are
probably dealing with last year’s records. Of
course, any time of the year, you are dealing with
junk mail. You know things like credit card offers
or warranty expirations or anything else under the
sun that might be riddled with someone’s personal
information.
You need a Shredder, period.
And you need to be taking care of those kinds of
things through the year, even as just an
individual, but especially as a business. If you
handle other peoples’ personal information, you
need to guard it carefully when it is still in use
and you need to destroy it when you no longer need
it.
There are several ways to
deal with this discarded information, including
using a company that specializes in destroying
massive quantities of paper records. When you opt
to use a company like this, do your homework. Make
sure that they are a reputable company. Check into
the training system they use to teach their
employees that are doing the work. Do they hire
trustworthy employees? Do they do back ground
checks? Are they bonded and insured? What kind of
liability do they assume once they are in control
of the information? Are members of reputable
organizations that help to assure that they are
legitimate and accountable? These are all very
important issues to consider. You certainly don’t
want to be handing private information over to a
Trojan horse.
If you operate a small
business, you may be able to get by with shredding
your own documents and disposing of it with the
garbage or recycling company. There are many
different considerations when choosing a shredder.
Things like;
-
How many sheets at a time do you
want to have the ability to do? Naturally, the
thicker the stack, the tougher and more expensive
will be the shredder.
-
Along with the stack of paper it is
capable of, you need to consider the duty cycle,
or how long can it run at any one time?
-
Do you want to pull staples and
paper clips before shredding, or do you want the
ability to run it all through the
shredder?
-
Do you want to shred it into
confetti? ( This is recommended for higher
security) Or just shred it into strips? And again,
typically, the confetti style will cost a little
more, as well as those that can cut through
staples and paper clips and credit
cards.
So whether you buy your own
shredder, or utilize a company to destroy your
private records, you owe it to yourself and to
those whom you have private information on, to
destroy that information to keep it out of the
wrong hands.
Identity theft is a major
problem now, and this is one way you can do your
part to prevent it.
Greg Whitehead, editor
JanitorialCloset, Discount and Wholesale Office
and Janitorial Supplies.
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