Shread head

It occurred to me that some of you might be wondering why I'm so excited about the new shredder, or perhaps you're wondering how it is that a single girl in her twenties has had personal relationships with more than one paper shredder?

I get tons of junk mail. TONS. The majority of it is pre-approved credit card applications (most of which are already filled out with my identification information and only require a signature), but there are also all sorts of magazine subscription forms, catalogs, letters from charities wanting donations, and other such crap.

Most of it I just recycle, but anything with personal info on it -- including all of the pre-approved forms, I shred. Sometimes the forms are for pre-approved loans, not credit cards. They just come in the form of blank checks. I hate those most of all. How tough would it be for someone to pull one of those out of the recycling bin, write it to him or herself, and cash it? Not hard.

For awhile I tried calling the companies to get them to stop sending the blank checks. With as much talk as there is about identity theft lately, it seems like an obvious liability. But calling didn't work; they keep coming.

In the last two weeks I was able to fill up an entire grocery sack with junk mail to be shredded.