Watch it shred

A shredding truck came to town a week or so ago. One of the local banks hired the truck and invited community members to bring their old files by for free shredding services. This truck was one of the big “shred-documents-by-the-ton” sort of trucks. You could roll up a sixty-gallon garbage bin full of paper and the truck would flip the contents into the grinder in one swift motion.

There was one small problem. Users presumably want to destroy documents so that they do not fall into the wrong hands. When you feed documents into a shredder at home, there is no question that the files are destroyed. However, when your documents are whisked up by the bin-full and thrown into a truck where they get shredded out of your sight, how can you be sure that they were in fact destroyed?

The control panel on this truck included a live video stream of the shredding compartment, so that the operator could monitor the process. This company was savvy enough to encourage the document owners to watch the video feed so they could see the documents destroyed.

Of course it is a tiny screen and a grainy video; so unless you have some ridiculously easily identifiable documents, all you would really know is that some documents were destroyed, but you may not really know that they were your documents.