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.