Let There Be Light

I wanted to write more about other crazy people at my day job, but it turns out that the woman who cries about the alignment of staples is just way ahead of the pack, and cannot stop providing me with blog fodder.

Here’s the current problem.

Recently, we started an effort to go more “green” This is corporate-speak for “let’s make stupid empty gestures while changing nothing”. For individual people, being green might have actual meaning, but filtered through layers of committees and focus groups and middle management, it just ends up being stupid.

They went into every single office and installed motion detecting light switches. They did this because there are one or two people who always left the office lights on when they left at night. This is not such a problem, because one, the cleaning crew comes around after everyone leaves, and they turn ALL the lights off, and two, most of the guilty light-wasters have been laid off and nobody really cares whether they’re sitting at home in the dark or not.

It probably would have been cheaper to go tell the remaining idjits to turn off the lights, but that would have been (gasp!) CONFRONTATIONAL. So the passive-aggressive pantywaists just gave all of us motion sensors.

I don’t WANT a motion sensor. It destroys what little dignity I have been pretending to have, because it turns your lights off if you stop too long to think, and you have to do a lot of arm flapping to turn it back on, so several times I’ve been caught sitting in my chair doing a spirited impression of a wounded whooping crane. Also, I always turned my lights off when I left, and my sensor is way too sensitive, so it turns on my lights when people walk by my office door. Therefore, I am using MORE light than I was before they gave me this great “green” device.

And of course there’s more. There’s always more, isn’t there?

The Staple Weeper is worried about flashing light, because she heard once that it might cause fits in epileptics. She does not have epilepsy THAT SHE KNOWS OF but thinks it is better to be safe than sorry. She is VERY concerned that my office light turns on when she goes past my office to the ladies room, because she might have a seizure. And she goes to the ladies room a lot, because she is an obsessive flosser. (What a shock, huh?)

Now, a normal person might solve this problem by walking down the center of the hallway, not so close to my office door, therefore not triggering the light. But that would be a NORMAL person. What SHE does instead, is to wait for me to leave, and then run over and immediately shut my door.

When the cleaning crew comes, they’ve been given instructions to leave closed door offices alone. So the cleaning crew does not come into my office, and they do not throw away my trash. I am sitting here with four days worth of sandwich wrappers and old Yoplait cups, which are beginning to reek a bit, because the Weeper is obsessed with closing the door so she can be sure she’s not going to have a spontaneous attack of epilepsy. Asking her to, and I’m quoting here...

...just results in her sobbing, and then doing the exact same thing that very night.

This is why I was in human resources this morning pointing out that our office should have a mental health professional on call 24/7. Monk is cool when he’s on his TV show and all, but hella annoying to work with.

I have two things I’m going to do to solve this.

One, I’m going to cover the sensor with a little piece of tape when I leave at night. Two, I’m going to wait until the Weeper isn’t looking and put my aging sandwich wrappers into her office trashcan.

I should be angry but I’m too busy giggling.

This should be good.