How I learned to shred...

Released 14/10/2008

…or why my local council is the bane of my existence

Selling shredders seems like a pretty straight-forward venture, I would have thought, i.e., ‘there are people out there that want to steal your identity, here's how you stop ‘em'. But who knew shredding your paper waste could also protect you from the prying eyes of your very own government council? I didn't. But I know now.

The incident occurred last week. Here I was, genuinely impressed by the speed at which my husband could put together anything delivered in a flat pack (living in a tiny London flat, Ikea storage solutions become your way of life). He assembled the thing, so my side of the bargain was dragging the wardrobe's cardboard shell out to the recycling shed around the side of our building, fighting blustery wind and a yob or two. I squashed it up into a manageable size, and squeezed it amongst the mangled pieces of Argos, Ikea and DFS containers. For many a recycler, this is where you say goodbye to your piece of biodegradable rubbish, so I closed the door, dusted off my hands and headed back into the warmth of our one-bedroom.

Until...four days later, I get a call from my other half wondering why on earth our wardrobe box was outside the recycling shed, exposed to the elements, and sporting a million ‘CRIME SCENE' labels in big red letters. I was baffled. Not only that, but a rather large square had been cut out of the card using a box cutter, exactly where our address label had been (oops, I had meant to remove that!).

The next day, we got a nasty letter and fine from our local council with pictures of the box, along with photocopies of the removed address label - which is who they knew who we were to fine us in the first place.

I had been framed! Someone, in between the time I had squashed up my little piece of cardboard into the recycling shed, someone had removed it. Whether this was a council worker, seeing our address label as too tempting to resist for some kind of quota (just a hunch) or a lazy bin man, I have no idea, but it resulted in a frustrated me, and a impassioned four-page letter of appeal by my husband.

So I did learn to shred, but it wasn't as a victim to a long drawn out case of ID fraud, but rather of a pokey council worker. To top it off, I got a resounding ‘I told you so' from my partial-to-shredding mother-in-law.

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