To Infinity and Beyond

It's the key to everything in our lives and the bane of our existence. It unlocks many doors and exposes us to danger. We love to rattle it off and fearful we may forget it. We memorize it within days of getting it for the innumerable times we will use it throughout our lives. This blessing and a curse is our social security number.

We have gone from using it recklessly to being possessive about it, refusing to share unless it is required by a financial institution with which we have immediate business.

When I set out to purge decades of old bills, I alternated between shock and intrigue at how loosely SSNs were used in the last century!

Tarun had term papers with student SSNs printed or hand-written on every page. Then there were the bank statements and all our bills. Add to that our tax documents. The worst offender? The checks with our SSNs printed next to our names! Back then cleared checks came back to us and I found myself neck-deep in boxes of checks with the secret of our existence emblazoned on the top left.

Over the years, these boxes grew in the utility room and spread into the attic.

Recently, I tackled them with a ferocious come-to-Mama wrath. I have spent hours of free time - amounting to DAYS! - sorting and separating documents into shred and recycle piles. After the 19th box, I developed x-ray vision and knew immediately whether an SSN lurked within an envelope.

To battle this mess, I was armed with a squealing shredder which overheats every five minutes. It was far from capable given the scale of effort ahead of me. In search of an industrial strength shredder, I went to the local office supply store whose founder I have admired for over twenty years. I was more than happy to give her our shredding business. But, on the umpteenth run to her shop, guilt set in for burdening her with monstrous piles of paper we should have taken care of years ago! Thank goodness she saw it as good business.

Is there any guarantee that I didn't pitch that one document with the potential to compromise us? There isn't. The reality is that a non-trivial chance of identity theft also exists if we are fully digital. So, I went out on a limb and purged the papers we have accumulated over the last four decades.

Tarun and my 40+ years of co-existence culminated in six small boxes of super relevant papers that we do not wish to discard. The other 53 boxes are resting in peace as confetti in shredder heaven (or hell).

I feel enormously lighter after the journey to what seems like infinity and beyond. Rest assured, we will never ever unthinkingly keep paper again.

Buzz Lightyear, you were right all along, decades before my epiphany!