One of my personal weaknesses is the lengths I will go for a joke. Sometimes it’s gotten me into trouble.

I used to work at a place that had a monstrous, top-heavy bureaucracy. Like all monstrous, top-heavy bureaucracies it generated mountains of paperwork. Mind boggling amounts, stuffed into bankers boxes and squirreled away into filing rooms.

I once described the amount of paperwork we had to deal with as salespeople as like a jet aircraft trying to break the sound barrier: the faster the jet flies the greater the drag from the air piling up in front of the nose of the aircraft.

That’s what it felt like: the more sales you made the more invoices you generated and, because the back-end systems were so ponderous the more reconciliations you had to do between invoices and inventory forms, until you spent more time reconciling your paperwork than you did talking to customers.

They were too cheap to hire sales support personnel to do that for their salespeople. But that’s not the point.

My point is, even though it didn’t feel like it, my employer did occasionally dispose of old records. Not only were they too cheap to hire sales assistants, they were too cheap to outsource document disposal to an outside agency like MobileShred or such.

Instead, in a corner of the back office they had a monstrous industrial-grade shredder. Not like your Office Depot-style $50 paper shredder that jams if you put more than two sheets at a time in it, this thing was the size of a dinette set, and had teeth on it. If you needed to shred phone books this was your machine.

As it happens, cleaning out our apartment prior to moving, I had a large bankers box full of old utility bills and tax returns (you have to keep those for at least six years in Canada, in case you were wondering) that would have been silly to move.

So one Sunday morning I went in to work early with my big box of documents and I started shredding them.

I won’t say I didn’t enjoy the process.

I was almost done when the office administrator, a stern, tightly laced older lady walked in and saw me furiously shredding documents.

I should mention that this was at the height of the Enron scandal, when everyday TV news was full of reports of missing documents and obstruction of justice.

“What are you doing?” she asked, giving me a funny look.

Because I’m a smartass, I couldn’t just tell her, I had to mess with her.

“I can’t tell you,” I replied “that would make you an accessory.”

That didn’t go over well. Monday morning I was called to the manager’s office and told to explain myself.

Of course, because I’d shredded all my personal documents the day before I had no evidence to support my version of events.

But by the same token, as I pointed out to him, there was no evidence of wrongdoing either: all my own paperwork history (for indeed, who else’s tracks would I be covering?) appeared to be intact and filed away properly.

End result, one more letter of reprimand (among many) for being a smartass in my personnel file, and a story to tell.