As mentioned, I have joined a Green Team at work, and have been thinking about two things in particular: ridding my floor of Polystyrene cups, at the modest end of the spectrum, and convincing all 100,000+ employees to ride their bikes to work, at the other.
My Green Team mentor has gone off to
There are several groups on my floor, and I had no idea what managers were involved, so I was kind of stumped as to how to go about this. I figured I would have to start by interviewing every second person to see whom he or she worked for, and then I’d have to approach managers who had never heard of me and try to convince them to do something: right.
There are two administrative assistants on this floor, one of whom is super-friendly. I’m sure she couldn’t tell you my name, but she always acts like seeing me is the best thing that has happened in her whole life. I think that’s a fine quality, and I don’t care if she’s being sincere or not—I think it’s OK not to be sincere if you can do a convincing impression of being sincere.
I told her I was working on a project to get rid of the Polystyrene cups, which are horrible for the environment. Sometimes I see someone snatch up a brand-new cup, put a quarter-inch of water in it, pour the water down his gullet, and toss the cup into the trash.
The administrative assistant was all for this, so this week I went to see what she thought of simply ceasing to order these cups, but she said, “I can’t make that decision,” and she told me who pays for all of the cups on this floor, just two managers.
So I then drafted an email asking the managers to consider doing away with these cups. I edited a PowerPoint presentation that had come my way about the money that can be saved by not using disposable items, and included that. I said I would schedule a meeting for next week, after they’d had time to look at the PowerPoint presentation.
I figured I would hear nothing back, and they would decline the meeting invite, and if I actually got to talk to them, they would say they weren’t comfortable depriving all of their team members of cups, and the whole thing would drag on for months, and I’d have to find time to brood about it when I already have my hands full brooding about the bike racks.
But what actually happened was that not 15 minutes after I sent my email, one of the two managers sent a directive saying the cups would be phased out, and a couple of minutes later, the other wrote, “Ditto,” and said he’d ordered mugs for his team members; the first manager said he’d ask his people to bring their own from home. No meeting needed!
The euthanasia of poor Lucky the rat is scheduled for this Thursday. I should say that even if we couldn’t pick her up, we were still fond of her, and I feel terrible about her current condition.
Tom always kept a supply of baby carrots for her, her favorite, and we talked to her and told her she was a good rat and a pretty girl. I think she knew we liked her, even though she would have been forced by instinct to bite us if we’d tried to pick her up.
She did manage to escape one time and proved to be quite a destructive force, chewing through, among other things, Tom’s iPod wire.
Her euthanasia will cost more than previously mentioned because she will need anesthesia in gas form because she can’t be handled. I will pay for it because I know it would be a lot for Tom, and because I did, after all, lobby for him to keep her as a pet after the snake didn’t eat her—twice—and maybe mainly because I feel like I’m her mom.
If your mom is the person who gives you carrots because she knows how much you like them and strokes your tiny fingers as they grasp the bars of your cage and tells you you’re a good rat, then I’m her mom, and so is Tom, so we must do what we can to help her out of the world painlessly.
Painless death at a pre-determined time is something rats can have that’s better than what humans can have, though I suppose there are a lot of a lot of things that are good about being a rat, like not having to be deployed to Iraq.
No comments:
Post a Comment