False economy

Where I work, they have pretensions of being green. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that they (at least) are fooling themselves.

About 12 months ago, something disappeared from the troughs of the urinals in our building. I know you're thinking the little yellow hockey puck things that stop it smelling like well a urinal. And you'd be partially right too. They changed to blue cubes. What disappeared was water, which means that pure....um you know was flowing into the sump and generally making things delightful. The place smells bad now and the amount of water saving is probably offset by the lack of hygiene...

The second thing they do is turn off the air conditioning every night. This is undoubtably good for the environment, but not so good for the hamsters that still have to work given we are a 24 hour centre.

The third thing that they did was a classic in dubious benefit history. They mandated that we should all go to company screensavers on our computers. This was apparently going to save 300 tons of greenhouse gases a year...

Not to be critical or anything, but I figure that these massive green efforts are probably offset by another directive which says that we must leave our computers turned on 24/7 in case they want to direct an update to the computers after hours. This has the added benefit that when the day staff clock on in the mornings after the air conditioning has been off all night, it then takes 6-7 hours for the air conditioners to drag the temperature back to normal.

Rant over. Catch you later.