On Thu, 2 Sep 2004 22:04:14 +0100, chris French
wrote:

In message , Ziggy
writes
On 1 Sep 2004 06:18:42 -0700, (Jon Nicoll)
wrote:

Hi all
any recommendations (or anti-recommendations) for makes and/or
models of paper shredders for home/small office use?

Buy an incinerator for around £15 - £20 and burn the stuff.

As others have mentioned, the cheaper machines tend to be straight cut
and this very often leaves stuff legible and can be put together (cf.
Iranian takeover of US Embassy in Teheran).

But does this really matter for the typical home/soho user?

I can't believe someone is going to bothered to root around in my bin to
piece together recipts/bills etc.

Don't you believe it.

A former colleague living in Switzerland had exactly this happen. He
lived close to the parliament in Bern in a district where mainly
business people and politicians resided. In typical tidy fashion,
there was a local ordinance that rubbish should not be put out more
than 4 hours before the appointed collection time. For him this was
1400, but of course he left for work at 0730 each day, so of course
put out the rubbish along with everyone else in the street immediately
before leaving.

One day, the colleague arrived home to find an official notice that he
should attend the local police station because of a complaint - the
subject being Abfall (rubbish).
He duly went there, only to meet a group of his neighbours and a very
weary police sergeant who explained that he, too, was aggrieved
because he had had a complaint from one of the politicians about the
rubbish. In order to identify the culprits, he had had to send out
his men at 0955 (just before the appointed time limit) to check
people's rubbish and look for envelopes etc. to identify who it
belonged to. My colleague was a definite shredaholic and everything
including junk mail went through his machine.

The police showed him a piece of paper with pieces of one of his
shredded envelopes stuck to it, reformed as his name and address..

If it can happen in Bern it can happen in Leeds.

His area of Bern was also described as "soho", but that was for a
different reason.




..andy

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