Rats and Taxes

I passed an eight foot tall rat on my way to work this morning. Now I do work in the city, and while Boston may not be the cleanest city in the world, neither is it overflowing with the kind of garbage that might attract an eight foot tall rat. We also do not have any nearby nuclear reactors that might contribute to the development of such a gigantic rodent. Imagine my relief when I got closer and saw that it merely an inflatable rat that was being used to draw attention to a local workers' strike. I can attest to its success in that department. It was hard to miss.

On the other hand, it didn't really make me think much about potentially unfair labor relations and so in that respect it wasn't very effective. Instead, it made me think of rats' nests and that made me think of my home office, which is a mess at the moment. And that made me wonder if perhaps it might be time for me to do some cleaning up before I, too, began to have my own share of rats. Not eight foot ones hopefully, but any size is too big if you ask me. I will admit that I may not be the cleanest person in the world, but neither am I a total slob. And this really isn't my fault I blame the government (and I'll resist the cheap shot of comparing the government to rats). My current problems come from getting ready for tax time. Piles of paper to be sorted through, documents to find, and old records to throw out

And when I say old records to throw out I, of course, mean shredded. If Hollywood has taught me anything, it's that Tom Cruise (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) is most likely lurking in the bushes outside my house just waiting for me to forget to shred even one of those already filled-out credit card applications from yet another credit card company. I'm not going to tell you what's in my wallet, but I can assure you that any company that keeps flooding me with weekly credit card applications is *NOT* going to wind up in my wallet.

But I digress. My big problem around tax season was always that shredding a lot of documents never seemed to help make things cleaner. Quite the opposite each time I had to empty the little shredder bucket full of shredded paper I managed to leave a trail of little paper bits all over the floor. I had successfully traded neat piles of paper for random sprinklings of confetti. At that point I had something that really did look like just the sort of thing a rat would love to build a nest in. Yuck.

Fortunately, I have a solution to this problem now; I work for a company that shreds documents and I can simply bring in my old tax papers (and credit card applications) to work and drop them in a shred bin. And then it becomes someone else's problem to deal with the confetti. And I don't even have to worry about what papers in the pile really need to be shredded and what can be safely placed in the recycling bin without exposing myself to the evil intentions of Tom (or a reasonable facsimile) I just shred it all. No mess, no fuss, no rats. Except for the eight foot tall rat next door that I have to walk past to get to work. Which is a little creepy and I hope they resolve their dispute soon.

LINK:	http://blog.ironmountain.com/2013/secure-shredding/rats-and-taxes/...
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