"I'm saving my Visa receipts for seven years and the accountants are shredding the Enron audit documents?" 

The Visa receipt saver -- OK, it was my mother -- has a valid point. It used to be that shredding was strictly extreme -- the last resort of desperate spies, Oliver North, and white-collar criminals on TV drama. Oh, and 15-year-old boys on snow boards. 

The rest of us dutifully squirreled away printed material, terrified that without the required shoe boxes and files bulging with receipts and bank statements, we would wind up in some kind of IRS auditing hell -- a scary place where men wearing narrow ties and white shirts force you at pencil point to balance an eternity of Kenneth Lay's checkbooks. 

Even Richard M. Nixon, widely considered a cover-your-tracks kind of guy, turned over stacks of incriminating White House tapes with only a teeny 181/2-minute segment missing. 

Now, though, the Arthur Andersen group -- an accounting force once believed to be the CPA version of Boy Scouts -- has been accused of shredding Enron documents like coleslaw -- and doing it after the subpoenas were issued. 

Clearly, shredding has moved out of the kitchen sink. It's a fact of life, and a business so big that the National Association for Information Destruction, based in Phoenix, has 250 members and estimates industry growth at 25-30 percent a year. 

Most shredding isn't evil or illegal, I learn from Willie Geiser, vice-president of the association's board of directors. It's routine and "appropriate." 

And given that a cyber-creep stole my computer password last month and a mysterious "security fraud" letter from a credit card company led me to fear my identity was threatened, I caved in. Bowed to the paranoiac spirit of the times. 

I bought a Fellowes PS60C-2 Home/Office Shredder, a machine that can turn 14 pages of paper into confetti every 60 seconds, and that is supposed to help protect even a fragile identity from thieves burrowing into trash bins. 

The PS60C-2 seemed impressive, but Geiser's company -- the Toledo-based Allshred Services -- uses a room-size machine that can shred six tons of paper an hour. It's tough enough to chew through a hammer, which happened once by accident. 

Companies like Allshred destroy everything from game warden uniforms (for the state of Ohio) to court documents. The paperless office, once widely predicted, is still a fantasy. And even without paper, Geiser's company can keep busy shredding new forms of information storage: computer disks, microfiche and microform, computer back-up tapes. 

In simpler times, a roaring fire solved the information problem. Worried that celebrity-hounds would use his correspondence, Charles Dickens burned his letters in a giant bonfire. Privacy is precious. There's always been tension between the need to preserve a record of the past, and the desire to destroy it. Only the artillery -- like my PS60C-2 -- has changed. 

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