whew, that was close

Today I was in an office of ours in the morning. That office was in the process of moving as well. So there were boxes everywhere getting packed. As usual like everyone else, this too was a time for spring cleaning. An essential part of spring cleaning is shredding. You tend to accumulate papers by the kilo till you have to move on and then you are inclined them. While I was roaming around one office peon was assigned to shred tons of paper in one of the conference rooms. Nothing unsual. But suddenly something on his table caught my eye. There were two books – Search by John Battelle and Leadership by the Book by Ken Blanchard. I asked him what these were for. To shred he said. My eyes popped out and my heart skipped a beat. SHRED THESE? The Search is easily amongst the best book on search engines there is today. It well written, analysed and informative. It made me think and changed by outlook towards search. It is easily amongst the top books I have read. Ken Blanchard is a prolific writer. Normally I shun away from such books. I kind of like to call these self help for dummies who don’t know commonsense. But I have a read a few of Ken’s books and I found them to be good. I was surprised my self and it did take some amount of ego eating to say – they are actually good. Rare for a management book to be commonsense, basic, easy and good. Ken has that art. He does talk sense. So I asked the peon if he was sure he had to shred these. He said he had already shred one. Oh god! No matter how bad the book I would never be able to shred one. Even Snowball is still lying in my cupboard. The worst of all - give it to someone else. Let someone else figure what to do with it. Give it for free at eth nearest signal to the book seller. He might figure out a way to sell it to someone else. How can you shred a book? How? The book was not even opened. It’s a good thing I rescued those babies from imminent danger. Just in time.