So there you go. The prophecy of a paperless office has been fulfilled. Or has it? My kids might do all their homework in electronic form, but I can assure you that no business that I have seen has managed to do the same. Some are worse than others. I recently re-mortgaged my house at a ridiculously low interest rate and signed so many papers – in duplicate – that I think I got carpal tunnel syndrome. We started signing papers in the morning and it took so long we had to send out for pizza – twice. Okay, I’m exaggerating slightly here, but only a little.

And even if you are not signing them, the funny thing about electronic documents (and high speed printers) is that it is so easy to print them out! Need to mark something up? Print it out! Handouts for a meeting? Print them out! Worried about your laptop crashing? Print out the documents and file them! Need supplies to support a paper airplane war between cubicles? Print out a bunch of documents! Wait… did I already print that document out? Not sure? Just print it again. Instead of getting rid of paper documents, we’ve made it so easy to create paper documents.

Want a great example of the durability of paper? A lady was arrested last year at the Chicago airport with a one-way ticket to China. She was a software engineer working for Motorola and was caught at airport security with a whole bunch of Motorola documents that were marked “confidential and proprietary information.” A software engineer. With incriminating paper documents. A software engineer who apparently never heard of a scanner. Or a smartphone with a camera. You don’t need a special spy camera these days to be James Bond. My phone has a scanner app that will take a picture of a document, do OCR on it, and turn it into a Word doc. If I was going to steal some trade secrets, I wouldn’t do it by stuffing my bags full of paper documents. For a good chuckle you can read the article in the Chicago Tribune.

So, while we can’t really say “My dog ate my homework” anymore, we can apparently still go unprepared into a meeting and toss out a “My dog ate my report.” Sort of. You try it out first and let me know how that works out.

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.

And before you think those sheets of paper are oh-so-innocent, let me tell you that they are not! No, they have a bite of their own and are quite capable of inflicting damage as well. And last weekend it happened. I was starting to sort through piles of last year’s papers, just trying to get ready for all the joys of tax season, when they struck. As I ran my hand across the top of a stack of paper, one sheet jumped out of the pile and bit my finger. It waited for the exact opportune moment to leap out. Just as it saw me pulling my hand away. Yes, you may call it an innocent paper cut, but I tell you this was no accident. And it was very effective. I’ve had paper cuts before, but this was a doozy. Must have been over a quarter inch deep. I’m surprised my bone wasn’t exposed it was so deep.

So there I was, in horrible pain, with blood spurting all over the place. I drop the sheaf of papers and they just laughed! Yes, it sounded like papers rustling but to the trained ear (and I did mention that I am a paper professional?) I could clearly hear them laughing. “Score one for the paper,” they chuckled. Ha ha. Very funny. But that last laugh was on me. Sure, they had their day. I was wounded – injured – bleeding profusely. But I took a deep breath, grabbed some tissue, went to the bathroom to wash it off, and applied a bandage. Then I went back to pick up the dropped paper and, with a maniacal grin on my face, slowly dropped them sheet by sheet in the nearby shred bin. Sure, I could have dropped the whole stack in all at once and been done, but I wanted them to suffer. They had attacked me and now they had to pay.

As I walked away I could hear them screaming in terror inside the shred bin, for they knew what was in store for them. Ripping, tearing, shredding, baling, pulping…yes, their time was coming. And meanwhile, my finger would heal.  Don’t mess with us humans.

Trees come in all shapes and sizes, and some are extraordinarily long lived.  The oldest non-clonal tree is currently a 4845 year-old Bristelcone Pine. The largest tree (in total volume) is a Giant Sequoia with an estimated volume of 52, 513 Cubic Feet. The tallest tree, a Coast Redwood, is 379 feet tall and the Dwarf Willow can be only 2 inches tall when fully grown, although some argue that it is really a woody shrub and not a tree.

So, what can we do to help these wonderful trees? Well, for starters, let’s not be so wasteful of their wonderful products. What are we more wasteful of than paper? Conventional wisdom holds that by recycling a ton of paper we can save 17 trees. The origin of this number is claimed by Conservatree who used it in a report to Congress in the 1970s. It was, however, a number that was calculated for newsprint which is very different from office paper. However, it was as good a number as any so it became the standard.

Is this a good number to use? Unfortunately, there are many variables involved in figuring out just how many trees are saved. This makes it difficult to list a single figure that applies to any general situation.

Office paper is made differently than newspaper and the process is less efficient. Newspaper is made from pulp that is made by a mechanical pulping process.  Office paper is made by a chemical pulping process with is less efficient but produces paper that lasts longer.

Coated paper (magazines, etc.) are only about 50 percent paper by weight and the rest of the weight is accounted for by a clay surface treatment. This means that if you are recycling coated paper, there is actually much less paper per ton that can produce pulp.

Not all paper comes from trees, at least not directly.  Actually, paper is made from three sources. First of all, pulp comes from scrap wood including sawdust. When a tree is cut up for lumber, some of it is extra and can’t be sold as wood. This includes scraps, shavings, odd sized pieces, etc. The second source of pulp is recycled paper. The third source is actually trees, but only small trees, usually under 8 inches in diameter. If the tree is any bigger than that it is more economical to cut it up for lumber. This is important because if you calculate how many 8 inch trees you save that figure will certainly be different than a calculation based on fully grown tress.

Paper also has a finite number of lives. Each time paper fibers go through the pulping process, the fibers get shorter and shorter. Eventually they are too short and just wash away in the process. Paper can be recycled an average of 7 times before it is all gone.

Because of all these different factors, as well as changes in pricing and availability of pulp sources, it is  nearly impossible to calculate an accurate number for the ration of tons of paper recycled to the number of trees saved without knowing specific details for a specific batch of paper. Using averages, we can at least make a ballpark estimate that might not be completely accurate for a specific batch of paper, but is completely reasonable on average. A more recent study set 12 trees per ton for newsprint and 24 trees for office paper. If you have a mix, 17 is still not a bad figure to use and one that is still widely used in the industry.

We created this number because we are trying to track the relative success of our recycling efforts and want to have some kind of feel for what we are saving. Whether the right number is 14, 17 or 20, as long as the formula is consistent and reasonable, then the result is useful and meaningful. Now stop calculating and go recycle something.

In fact, what is in my wallet is not actually a Capitol One card (shhh… don’t tell them that) but the things that are critical for my daily life around town. Money, of course. My driver’s license, which is useful to prove my identity, buy drinks, and drive a car. My bank card so I can get more money. A few credit cards, my T (subway) pass, and sometimes a few receipts that I need to save or a laundry ticket. Last, but certainly not least, a picture of my family. Pretty standard I’d guess.

All of these are things I need to get around in life except one – the family picture. The picture has only sentimental value, that’s all.  It’s not useful and I rarely take it out. If I run into an old friend I’m far more likely to bring up pictures on my phone to show them. So why do I have it? Maybe if I was suddenly teleported to Mars, or there was a nuclear war (hey, it could still happen) and my phone stopped working and everything was gone, it would be at least one link to my loved ones. I’d prefer a few photo albums and some DVDs in that case, but those don’t fit in my wallet. Nor do they fit easily in a safe deposit box at a bank, which wouldn’t’ help me if I was teleported to Mars, but would help if my house was turned into kindling by a tornado or burned down in a fire.

It would not be a bad idea to take a page from big business here and figure out what is really important and make sure that I had copies of the important things kept safely in some other location – one that is protected and secure. For me this would probably be some combination of financial information – accounts, addresses, etc. – and personal items like DVDs of family events and maybe a usb stick with photos on it.  Big businesses do this all the time: they figure out what they would need to keep the business running and make sure that those documents (or copies of them) are stored in a safe place.

But notice that I keep using the word “big” when I talk about businesses. All too often, small businesses act more like individuals and, like me, could easily be left with only a small photo in their wallet if disaster struck their business location. Sure, many records are electronic and might be able to be recreated by going to all the companies you do business with and asking them for new copies but do you really want to have to go through that when trying to recover from a disaster? And what if those companies are also trying to recover as well? Hurricane Sandy recently unleashed devastation all over the eastern seacoast with New York City being hit particularly hard. Everyone there was scrambling. All at the same time.

The first step is to make sure that you are at least using some form of backup for your computers. This can mean a cloud-based backup system for individual PCs, or an offsite tape storage site for tape backups if you have a large enough computer infrastructure. But what about paper documents? Paper is far from dead, and many documents still exist only in paper. I’ll bet you’ve got cabinets or even boxes of old documents that are important but not used in your daily business. At home I have old tax receipts, bills, statements and such in a few boxes in the basement. Yes, I realize that is just one flood away from being mushy paper pulp and I should know better, but I’ll bet you are not different. And probably neither is your business, if you work at a small business.

People often turn to offsite storage when they run out of room. Taking those records home to your basement is just begging Mother Nature to visit you with some fun so that’s not a good extra space solution. Engaging an offsite records storage company is always cheaper than renting more office space or adding on to the building, and much safer than your basement. But small companies should really think about what is sitting around the office that isn’t being used right now but is still important and might be needed. Those are the things that should also be put in an off-site storage facility for safekeeping. Now – not just when you run out of space.

You can get them back right away any time you need them, but once they are in storage they are going to be safe from harm.  And safe doesn’t mean a self-storage facility, it means using a company that actually deals with records storage and can guarantee both security and the safety of your boxes of papers with a robust solution. Because then, while you might not have all your important business records in your wallet (the business equivalent of family photos), you can at least rest easy knowing that they are safe and secure, and so is your business. Unless , of course, you get teleported to Mars.

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At Iron Mountain we take shredding very seriously. We work diligently every day to make sure we stay worthy of the trust our customers place in us. We think of more efficient ways to shred documents. We check and double check our security procedures. We monitor and streamline our operations. And when it’s time to dress up for the office Halloween party at Iron Mountain, we are still consumed with shredding. A great example of this was demonstrated by Greg Sanders, who works at Iron Mountain’s corporate headquarters in Boston. This year, he revealed the obsession that we all live and breathe over - secure destruction - by covering himself with strips of paper and then wrapping himself in chains and locks. Yes, he was the very personification of Secure Shredding!   It should be noted, of course, that he did not cover himself with real shredded documents from Iron Mountain, since the pieces are too small to work well in the costume and in any case that would not be secure.

I can’t help but draw the parallel between this wonderful costume and real life in many offices. I’m talking about places where there may not be a literal Shred Monster roaming the halls, but there is certainly a figurative one stalking the building. Shredding can be easy. Shredding can be simple. Why is it still complicated in so many places?

There are still companies that make use of individual office shredders scattered around the office. People stand around and feed sheets of paper into the shredder. This is clearly a case of the Shred Monster stealing hours from their week when they could be doing something actually productive instead of feeding the shred beast. Shredding services let you simply drop fistfuls of paper into a shred bin and be done. No spoon-feeding required.

And then there are companies that have detailed policies about what paper goes into the shredder (or even shred bin), what goes into recycling, and what goes into trash (hopefully not the latter). Once again, the Shred Monster is gobbling up productivity for no good reason! A responsible shred service will recycle all the shredded paper once it has been destroyed. No sorting through piles of paper trying to figure out what is confidential and what is not. Just dump it all in a shred bin and be done with it.

So simple a solution for all of this, but still something that not everyone has adopted. There are still people out there that are feeding the Shred Monster. And it is cheerfully eating up your productivity and time. Don’t be another victim of this dreadful office menace!

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The concept of a mindless brute has been with us since ancient times. The original Golem of Jewish lore was a sort of zombie. Not created by re-animating the dead, true, but still showing the characteristics of the mindless zombie. Zombies were present in Vodou tradition as a mindless servant raised from the dead by a Bokor (a Vodou sorcerer). Many in western culture had their first real exposure to the modern day zombie with George Romero’s classic film, The Night of the Living Dead. In that tale, the monsters are not yet referred to as actual Zombies, being called Ghouls instead. But Romero’s film marked the arrival of the mindless but self-motivated creature that comes back from the dead to eat the flesh of the living. These slow, shambling monsters were later augmented by faster versions that were not reanimated corpses but were instead created by a virus as in 28 Days Later.

But the term “zombie” has also come to be used to describe anyone in a mindless stage. A person, even if not attracted to snacks of living flesh, who shuffles through life, day in and day out, with no clear motivation or direction. A person who seems to have lost the spark of life and is merely a mindless brute that can fulfill basic tasks, but can hardly be called truly alive. Enter the office zombie into popular culture. The concept of a work zombie, or office zombie, is a humorous poke at boring work conditions, often in settings of large corporations where the individual has lost their identity and is merely a human automaton. But that can’t really happen, can it? This is just a cultural meme, right?

Unfortunately, I am here to report that there have been many actual sightings of these office zombies. And while the apocalypse might not yet be upon us, stocking up on canned goods and keeping with a full tank of gas might not be a bad idea. For scientists have discovered the horrible truth: Office zombies do exist and are multiplying at an alarming rate! What is the cause? Can it be stopped? Fortunately for us all, there appears to be a cure. What is this cure, and will it be too late?

There is only one way to find out – see what the scientists have discovered and learn the truth about office zombies. Go to http://no-zombies.com before it’s too late, and find out what you can do to protect your office! There may still be time…

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“Painless” and “shredding” are two words that most people don’t usually think of in the same sentence. But, if you are the Healthcare Information Manager responsible for your facilities’ compliance program, you are responsible for shredding and you want it to be painless. Of course, most don’t give shredding much thought. If you only have to shred a small number of patient records a day, it’s not a big part of your life. But with the requirements for HIPAA compliance, and the associated risk of fines, you may find yourselves having to securely destroy more and more records that are past their retention period.

And let’s face it, while shredding might not cause physical pain, aside from the occasional paper cut, it certainly can *be* a pain. Shredding by hand takes time. It’s boring. Who hasn’t used a shredder and tried to feed too many pages at once because you got impatient and then had to stop and clear the paper jam? That is certainly a pain. And while that steady whir of the shredder is harmless at first, 10 minutes later it can begin to grate on you. And then there is the fun of periodically buying new shredders each time the one you have wears out.

Now compare that with easily dropping these records into a shred bin and going on your way, off to do something actually productive. No mindless shredding, no wasted time, no clearing paper jams, no buying new shredders. Just drop your paper into the bin and it periodically gets emptied like magic and without any effort on your part. Painless.

Well, at least it is if you have a reliable vendor and your shred bins get serviced properly and are never full or overflowing. Because if they don’t get emptied on time you can end up wandering around looking for a shred bin that is not full. Or worse, stacking confidential information in a pile next to the full shred bin, hoping that when it does get emptied someone will put all those piles of paper into the empty bin.

Or unless you are the one responsible for managing the shredding service. When your destruction needs grow beyond a few shred bins, managing the program can also bring you pain. Trying to figure out how many bins you need, where you need them, and when you need them serviced can be a pain. The only way to solve this pain is with a company that has the experience monitoring and optimizing your shred program to make sure you have the coverage you need, but only the coverage you need, for painless program management.

And, of course, there is significant pain in getting sued and/or fined because something that should have been shredded was accidentally put into the trash and later discovered. If your shred program is not easy, you may inadvertently put some documents into the shred bin and some into the recycling bin. And with the significant fines associated with breaches, you definitely want to make sure that your document destruction guidelines are always in complete sync with all the retention requirements and HIPAA regulations. Working with an experienced vendor who can give you guidance on what you can keep and what you can destroy is a definite key to eliminating the pain of being sued or fined (or both).

But there is another aspect to using a good shredding service that is also painless: being painless for the environment. When you shred paper in an office shredder, what happens to the shredded paper? Does it go into a recycling bin, or is it placed in the trash? All too often it winds up in a dumpster, and then in a landfill somewhere. Be sure to choose a service partner that will recycle your shredded documents. So there you have it. As you transition to the electronic medical record, you now have a prescription for a pain free document destruction program. Shredding that is painless for you, painless for your health system, and painless for the environment.

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So what on Earth is pareidolia? Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon where people believe they see something in random stimulus. Seeing images in clouds, hearing sounds in static, etc. The word comes from a Greek construction meaning, basically, “wrong shape”. It’s a type of apophenia, which is when people see patterns or connections in random information.  Gamblers have apophenia a lot – looking desperately for some connection between random actions and the draw of a card or drop of the ball. Of course, the real question is: when is there an actual pattern, and when is it merely a case of pareidolia?

Take a pile of shredded paper – lots of little pieces of paper with a few characters on each one. A pile of tiny little document fragments. If you look closely you can see little snippets of a word. And if you look some more, you might see another little piece that looks like it might belong with the first piece. Bingo – you’ve started to re-assemble the document. Maybe.

Some of you may be old enough to remember the Iran hostage crisis, or at least have heard of it. Some of the dramatizations show us how the embassy personally shredded all their documents, but didn’t have time to then burn the pile of shredded paper before the crowd gained entrance and took them all captive. We thought the documents were secure, but the Iranians assembled a gym full of women who went through the strips of paper one by one until they found a match. Then another match. Then another. This was brute force pattern matching. Ultimately, they had re-assembled all the documents.

But that could never happen to you, could it? You use a cross-cut shredder which makes little pieces of paper, not strips. And you empty your bin full of little strips into the trash or recycling container and it just looks like a pile of snow. Safe and secure. The only way you will get any information from that pile is through pareidolia (in other words, you won’t). Or could you?

The problem with using an office shredder is that the documents, although shredded, are still physically together. Maybe in little pieces, but still together. And they are dumped into the trash together. They might get dumped loosely into a dumpster and perhaps scattered a bit further, but more likely they wind up in a plastic bag where they are conveniently all kept together. But even so, you could never match up all those tiny pieces, could you. Or could you? I suppose if you had a gym full of people matching up piece by piece you might be able to. Or…if you could scan all of the pieces and use some pattern matching software you could have a computer do it. The more you can limit the scope of the problem, the easier it becomes. And computers do not engage in pareidolia. If they find a match, it’s a match.

It might be interesting to do some math here – how many documents in an average full shredder bin, how many pieces per document, etc. etc. except that would make for a really long blog. But you get the point. So how are commercial shredding services, like those provided by Iron Mountain, any different? For starters, the sheer scope of the operation is on another scale. Papers from many different customers are all mixed together at the shred plant. Literally, hundreds of thousands of pages, all unrelated. An individual document might end up with its pages scattered around a big pile of paper before it is even shredded. And when I say a “big pile” I mean tons of paper. Then it’s all shredded, and the shredded material is packed together into a bale the size of a car. The story doesn’t stop there – the bale is then turned into pulp and recycled into new paper products.

So the document isn’t just shredded, it is utterly and totally destroyed. It isn’t strips of paper, or rectangles of paper, or even confetti. No amount of women in a gym can put that document back together again because there is simply nothing to put back together. And no matter how hard you stare at the blank, smooth recycled paper even a bad attack of pareidolia won’t help you see anything there. So back to your cloud watching if you want to see hidden images, because you won’t get them out of a professional shredding operation.

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I’m sure we all have our favorite lines from the movie. Unless you are one of the three people on the planet who didn’t see the movie, which means you probably just woke up from a very long coma or had been kidnapped by aliens and only just now returned. But assuming that you did see it…what stands out for you?

Probably my favorite line was when Frodo said that he wished none of this had ever happened, and Gandalf replied that it is not our choice — all we really have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. In other words, stop complaining and make the best of what you have. But it sounds so much better when Gandalf says it.

Another line I liked was when Gandalf bursts into Frodo’s house, looking quite upset and demands, “Is it secret? Is it safe?” Now, if you were in a coma or kidnapped by aliens you might want to stop reading here because I’m about to give away some major spoilers. Gandalf had come to suspect something was up with Frodo’s ring and told him to keep it secret and keep it safe. Then he went away to learn more about it. When he had learned enough to be concerned that it was indeed The One Ring of power, he rushed back to make sure it was in fact still secret and safe. And of course, it WAS The One Ring and thusly ensued (more Middle Earth talk) a long and perilous journey during which friendships were tested and Dwarves were tossed. None of which would have been necessary if Isildur, that slacker, had listened to Elrond and destroyed the ring earlier instead of deciding to keep it because it might look nice mounted over his mantle like a prize fish.

I, for one, have learned several lessons from this whole affair. The first is that any rings I find must immediately be cast into Mount Doom, just in case. The second is that it’s no fun to lose sleep wondering if “it” is secret and safe. This can apply to a large number of things, many of which we use in business. If you really are worried about keeping something secret and safe – like the ring – it might be best to just destroy it as soon as you are done with it. Old business plans, customer data, credit card receipts, sales reports, medical records, insurance information, formulas for making rings of power. Once you are done with these things, they are best destroyed, and not left lying around even if they are tucked away down deep under the Misty Mountains.

Unlike rings of power, documents are pretty easily destroyed. If you are really bored you can cut them into small pieces with a good pair of scissors. You might go buy an office shredder and feed them, a few pages at a time, into the shredder to destroy them. I suppose you could even buy a goat (do goats really eat paper, or is that a myth?). Even more easily than any of these options, however, you can simply sign up for secure shredding service from Iron Mountain and just drop them into the slot on the top of a shred bin. Poof – they are gone forever. It’s just like having your own little Mount Doom in your office, except that there is no smelly lava and we generally discourage people from dropping rings into the bins. So do yourself a favor: sign up for regular shredding service (with Iron Mountain), destroy all those documents that you are worried about, and stop losing sleep wondering if they are secret and safe. Because they are. And you don’t even have to trek all the way into Mordor to make sure.

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