SHREDDING PARTY.(The Talk of the Town)

A lot of stuff was shredded when Shred Across America, a seventeen-city document-shredding tour, stopped in Union Square recently. People who had heard about what Staples, the tour's sponsor, was calling "a mobile shredding event" brought over bags of old bills and checks and sensitive financial documents to be shredded. Staples had set up a stage in the park, on which the event's host, Justin Patricoff, demonstrated the store's shredders. Patricoff, a thirty-year-old promotional-tour veteran from Dayton, Ohio, has been on the road for the past three and a half years, most recently as part of the Got Milk? Milk Mustache Tour. "I'll be driving the actual shredding truck," Patricoff said. He motioned toward a twenty-four-foot-long mobile shredding unit, an SF200, that he had driven from Spokane, Washington, where it was built, by a firm called Shredfast, Inc. "It's a family company, and they're like the Orange County Choppers of the shredding-truck industry," he said, standing beneath a banner reading "Shred*Protect*Recycle." "Shredding is really addictive," he added.

In the meantime, Patricoff revved up the crowd. "Do you trust all your friends?" he asked. "You trust special people, that's right! You trust yourself, yes. You trust A No. 1, that's right, buddy!" He solicited identity-theft stories. A guy took the microphone and told a long, incoherent tale punctuated by the words "cops," "house," "my son," "Penn Station," and "got it back." A man who wanted to shred said that his Social Security number was stolen so that someone could purchase a Ford Taurus in his name.

"Now, you're sure you didn't give the Ford Taurus to a neighbor as a gift?" Patricoff asked.

Then he got back to shredding. He shredded junk mail printed specially for the occasion by Staples: a fake-credit-card offer made out to a fake name, Mike Haggs. In two tents set up beside the truck, passersby were able to shred Mike Haggs's mail or blank CDs that were labelled "SHRED ME" and sounded, when being ...