Monthly Archive for September, 2002

In an effort to clean-up my living space I got together ten years worth of old paperwork and readied it for the trash. The problem? I didn’t want to put old bank and utility records in the trash in an "unencrypted" form. I wen’t out and bought myself what anyone who’s trying to avoid identy theft buys, a paper shreder. A $12.99 special that takes up to nine pages at once. Needless to say, I did a several small shreading sessions over the corse of a week rather than go "all day" to get it done at one Fawn Hall inspired sitting.

Well, tonight I finished. Actually I only thought I finished, but then I found one more pile of old receipts and ATM slips in the corner. I was gonna blindly chuck them into the machine’s mouth as fast as possible, but I figured I’d give a few of the slips a quick look before I sent them south. Lucky me, a quick sift through the dead-tree rubble yielded the following: 1) A crisp 1995 Two Dollar Bill, 2) a check dated Nov. 1, 1999 (that expired after 120 days) from my insurance company for the whopping sum of $2.20, and 3) an American Express Gift Cheque for $25 (this time with no expiration date). I think of this last small discovery as a touch of monetary karma for taking care of my old paper the "correct" way.