In Vienna and Gaithersburg yesterday, a dozen giant paper-shredders roared outside two community banks. For the hundreds who came to feed them bags and boxes full of their long-held secrets, it was all, officially, in the name of identity-theft prevention, in the interest of being safe. But for many, it was also about the process of letting go.
The shredding trucks arrived at 7:30 a.m., though some people had gotten in line as early as 6:30, so eager (and perhaps desperate?) were they to unload years of personal records, headaches and memories into the document destroyers. By the end of the afternoon, close to 80 tons of credit card statements, cell phone bills, love letters, college midterm papers and W-2 tax forms had ceased to exist.
Every day people face a new scam that inflames fears and the desire to hide. There's that newscaster intoning about swindling real estate agents. (And you just bought a new home!) That e-mail you got from a mysterious Bank of the West this morning: "CONSUMER ALERT," screams the subject line. "In order to protect your information against unauthorized access, identity theft and account fraud we earnestly ask you to update your profile. To get started, please click the link below" and enter your Social Security number and mother's maiden name.
Last year nearly 250,000 Americans were victims of identity theft, including 922 in the District, 4,612 in Maryland and 4,742 in Virginia, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
But this is not news to Bill McSweeney, 42, a Shred-it employee from Chesapeake Beach, Va. He's working the Vienna shred-fest at Mercantile Potomac Bank, wearing a blue and white striped button-down shirt with a patch on each sleeve: "Mobile Paper Shredding -- Document Security."
He interrupts an elementary school principal who is talking about the old copies of teacher evaluations, student report cards and credit card offers she just shredded (finally!) to point out that billions and billions of dollars have been stolen from U.S. companies through corporate trash-digging.
"I've been shredding for four years," he says. "It's boring but important."
When McSweeney started as a driver/shredder, the company's Rockville branch had eight trucks, and bank fraud and identity theft were less of a hysteria-starter. Four years later, it has 21 trucks and McSweeney is now a sales rep in charge of convincing Northern Virginia businesses that corporate espionage is a threat to their existence.
"Say I'm another company," McSweeney says. One of the best ways to throttle the competition is, let's face it, sneaking around and looking through their trash. "They can find out about you, what you do, your accounts, things like that.
"So wouldn't it be good to have a system to protect you against identity theft? If that one paper got out there" -- and into the hands of corporate parasites -- "what kind of devastating loss would that be? Loss of income, loss of jobs, loss of business. Don't you think your company is worth protecting?"
Just as McSweeney is finishing his sales pitch, Jim Hickel of Ashburn lugs a Huggies Ultratrim box and four other dilapidated cardboard containers. He smiles as a driver tosses the boxes' contents -- mostly tax records and credit card statements dating back to 1997 -- into the mouth of the shredder. Hickel says he is a compulsive filer, and, most important, a total sucker for the grave voice on the Channel 4 newscast that warned him that not shredding his files could result, quite possibly, in additional Jim Hickels, age 57.
"Well, it got me," says Hickel. "So I'm here."
Angela Owens, director of station communications for NBC4, which co-sponsored the event, said an estimated 1,250 people pulled into the Vienna and Gaithersburg locations to drop off their life's baggage. The box with a lid that read "Tax & records 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986"; the Pampers Cruisers crate overstuffed with a no-longer-wanted paper trail; the Tanqueray and Miller Lite boxes -- they all seemed to have stories of their own. None of the owners got a "Certificate of Destruction," which Shred-it usually gives to its customers, but the weight of the experience was clear enough: Gone, gone, gone, all 78,000 pounds of human intrigue, now indistinguishable paper specks, to be recycled for future shred-athons.
One woman seems relieved to be unloading her waist-high box packed with junk mail and randomness -- all the things that her two "overworked" shredding machines at home couldn't manage -- to a stranger.
The Shred-it man holds up a CD case. Does she want it? She shakes her head, so it's tossed into the mechanical roar. This travel-size bottle of lotion? No. How about this shiny quarter? She smiles, takes it and walks away.
We catch up with her; a friendly chat ensues and we ask for her name.
"Hah," she says.
She reveals her name to no one, except her mortgage company.
We should have known.
