Somehow, I do not think this line of argument is going to work with my employer. I know this sounds harsh, but aspects of Greenery are starting to resemble a form of mental illness.
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41 comments to More sage advice about “saving the planet” |
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I’ve been trying to get my employer to agree to this for a couple of years. I sit in an office by myself and never talk to anyone except by phone, and that rarely. Most of the work I do is working with people in other countries. Last October, when we were in the process of moving offices, I worked at home and billed 32% more hours than my monthly average in the year up to then. But they just won’t agree, they say they ‘need’ me in the office. They can’t explain why, but they do.
The reason it won’t work is that most middle management cannot get their heads around the notion of not being able to walk through their petty little empire and see their minions hard at work.
A possible solution might be to rig up a webcam of some sort, poised to overlook your home working area and machine, with access given to your manager. This gives the manager his petty oversight, and lets you rig an electronic film loop so you can bunk off down the pub if needs be.
I liked this (Link)
“Sheryl Crow has said a ban on using too much toilet paper should be introduced to help the environment.”
No tips are given on how to enforce such a ban. Or indeed what ‘too much’ means.
New rule: Every time one of these feel good pop stars / movie people calls for an unenforceable law just to make it look like they are part of the solution and not part of the problem we firebomb one of their mansions.
Careful about pushing the remote working thing, or before you know where you are your job will be outsourced to China.
Flexible working does allow one to make the commute less hellish by coming and going out of the rush.
…firebomb one of their mansions.
Come on now be responsible – think of the increased carbon emissions involved in that!
Walter Boswell,
I scooped you on that one last night!
…and if it doesn’t, we’ll tax energy until it does.
…and any saving you do make we’ll tax that, too.
In the past week, I’ve seen people advising me to avoid leaving taps running to avoid climate change, as well as Sheryl Crow’s gem about loo paper.
The only link I can possibly see between water consumption and climate change (assuming for one minute that climate change is caused by humans, except on Mars obviously) is that I suppose processing water consumes some energy, but that’s increadibly tenuous.
But the toilet paper one I just can’t figure out. If a tree gets cut down to make toilet paper AND isn’t replaced by other vegetation AND the tree is one of the rare tropical ones which don’t absorb more heat than they prevent AND the toilet paper ends up getting burnt WHEREAS the tree would have fallen into a peat bog, then perhaps, but again, it’s so tenuous (compared to, say, the carbon footprint of a Sheryl Crow concert) as to be meaningless.
So when I wiped this morning, I used an extra thickness in complete confidence.
As you say, it’s just retarded. You just couldn’t make this stuff up.
manuel II,
But you see, Ms Crow (being a celeb) has her bog-roll exclusively manufactured from teak and mahognany. with a silk finish.
Everyone else has toilet paper made from cheapo trees with needles on em (whatever ya calls em) from managed forests where the trees are then replaced D’oh! And young growing trees actually take in more CO2 than old mature, going nowhere trees.
Can we arrange to have Ms Crow’s house teepeed as a protest?
Greenery is far more than a mental illness, it is a religion. Anyone that disagrees with the religion has hatred and vile spewed upon them (and sometimes death threats!). Also, many of the assertions of the green movement (about global warming) are un-assailable, much like the faith in a deity.
The woman is a dingbat!
She will never write a song as good as Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi either.
Thank God she is too young to know of the “Hard” toilet paper, that was the only toilet paper, in my youth!
That stuff, by a company called Izal I think, was like a cross between grease proof paper and razor blades.
I kid you not, a quick swill under the tap, and you could have used it over and over!!!
“…aspects of Greenery are starting to resemble a form of mental illness.”
Johnathan, my only quibble is with the words “starting to”. The mental illness began in the 1960s, with Head Nutjob Rachel Carson.
RAB,
Reusable toilet paper in the Wales of yesteryear…
How green must your valley have been?
Ah! Izal medicated. Sterling stuff – Makes one quite nostalgic…
Re Water and loo paper. So if you have a bidet you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t then, – Oh poo!
Ych yr fie !
I agree!!
If the silly bitch had any sense she would be installing a Turkish toilet in her Tour Bus.
These are a toilet and bidet in one. Turn that handle by the side of you, and a warm jet of water shoots right up your….
The only paper you need is to gently dry!
I seem to remember that a US court decided some years back the environmentalism was NOT a religion. Thus it could be taught in public schools.
They may be right, Greenery seems closer to a wierd sort of pagan death cult than to anything that might properly be called a religion. Taken to its logical extreme it would require the human race to kill itself in order to ‘save nature’.
Meanwhile we’ll just have to put up with Ms. Crow’s babbleing on until she gets bored and decided to save the endangered rocks or takes up something useful like knitting scarves for Andalusian liberationists.
Turkish Toilet, pah!
If Ms Crowe wants to be really green she could perhaps take a leaf out of Ms Barrymore book…
Why doesn’t she do a life-swap with one of those noble savages then?
(Link)
I got made redundant in 2004.
So the chief creep says “Sign your patent rights over” and offers me a cheque for ten pounds.
I found this company in New Jersey which will print anything on a roll of toilet paper.
Even ten pound cheques.
(But when I last asked they had sold out of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden toilet paper).
“The reason it won’t work is that most middle management cannot…”
The middle managers are afraid, correctly, that if people stop “coming to work” some higher-ups might notice that the business works pretty well without those middle manager’s “supervision”, and might send those middle managers home, to work from there, and then discover that those middles can’t do much work by themselves.
If all the 800,000 extra public sector workers Blair has hired were sacked their travel to work CO2 emissions would be saved. Most of them have non-jobs, so its ungreen to keep them on the payroll.
What pete, even the local authority “climate change co-ordinators”?
And the “sustainable development managers”?
Surely not. THEY ARE SAVING THE PLANET!
Magnificent headline in the Mail on Sunday’s “Live” magazine this week (I’m just not sure if the irony is intentional):
Ooh, I don’t know. One of these chaps, or the many scientific organisations and universities they work for? The IPCC? The Met Office? Wincey Willis?
No.
Of course! That bird who played the mermaid in Splash! Who else? She knows what she’s talking about, too, because her dad sent her to camp as a kid and she lives in a teepee sometimes, so don’t scoff.
Splash! Great movie.
Yeah, but that was back when Tom Hanks was still funny.
I saw his D-Day film and only laughed twice.
Daryl Hannah is solar powered? Where does she hide her batteries? Inquisitive minds want to know!
Not solar powered. I thought she of the ability to crush Harrison Ford’s head between her thighs was more renowned for drinking the same reprocessed chipfat that she put in her SUV?
Could well be…She is also tall enough to function as a mobile windmill. The possibilities are seemingly endless! The woman should be cloned. The same could apply to Crow, as she is also quite good looking and has a nice voice. In both cases, though, there has to be a way to avoid cloning the brain tissue. If Bernard Shaw was alive, he could take heart in the prospect…I better stop here.
Everybody can leave Sheryl the hell alone.
Here’s something I don’t get: when one needs music suitable for drinking and brooding, why are the best choices ALWAYS female singer-songwriters with utterly moonbat politics?
I mean, really, why is the Sunfish Divorce playlist all Sheryl Crow, the Indigo Girls, and Sarah MacLachlan, who combines beautiful lyrics, an amazing voice, and I have no idea what her politics even are, but I discovered her music in college and my crush on her still hasn’t subsided.
Not that we’ve wandered far afield or anything. I’m a little disappointed, though: How many comments, and nobody’s made the “Conserve Water: Shower With a Friend” jokes?
Tsk Tsk Terribly sorry Officer!
I have been a bit busy getting ready to go to Italy next week.
I say I say I say ! Who was that woman I saw you showering with this morning?
That was no woman! That was the three birds I pulled over on that Wishes thread.
So for Chrissakes dont tell the wife!
Boy have we been reducing our carbon foot prints! Not to say wearing away certain parts of our anatomies.
Still, It’s swings and roundabouts isn’t it? The mess we’ve made of the bed, what between the Haggen Daz , sweat blood and candlewax stains, will require a full cycle wash. So back to square one.
Swings and roundabouts ? Swings and roundabouts?
I’ve just had an idea!!
Girls! oh Girls could you come in here a minute….
RAB: you are not about to drive anywhere right now, are you?:-O
Sunfish: the shower joke is not really funny, because it can actually make sense. Well, if not from a green perspective, at least from a blue one. The toilet paper bit, however, is totally in the “you cannot make shit (pun alert) like that up”.
Alisa.
How very very dare You!! *
I do not drive.
I am driven!
As for the swings and roundabouts,
I was merely thinking of their utilisation of kinetic energy attached to batteries that could green the planet from purely pleasurable activity.Honest!
* Catchphrase from the Catherine Tate Show.
Catch is if it comes over to USA. Or via the various BBC video sites.
We have it here in Holy Land – is it funny in a Benny Hill kind of way?
Watch it and judge for yourself.
If you read articles from British Newspapers even on purely political subjects, there will be an argot of popular culture dropped into the narrative to illustrate whatever point is trying to be made.
Hence even our dear PM Blair, has used
Yeah! but no! But Yeah!
from Little Britain in a speech.
Similarly “Am I bovvered!!??
Am I Bovvered Tho !!!???
Also from Catherine Tate, is becoming well known shorthand over here to describe certain types of society that our country has become.
I wish our politicians would examine our culture as closely as comedians do.
They would be in for a timely shock!
RAB:
Going back to the hard toilet paper (not literally though!),
was that the stuff that had “Now wash your hands please” printed on it?
Sheryl Crow deserves all the abuse she gets, if only for that Godawful cover of “Sweet child o’mine.”
More than likely steve P, but I cant exactly remember.
I have been ignoring admonishing government messages on packaging since I was an infant.
One thing’s for sure though-
You’d never poke your finger through it!
If the company still exists, and we wish Prince Harry to stay alive during his Iraq tour of duty, then I suggest he wraps himself and his Scorpion in the product.
Not even shaped charges will touch him!
You know not what you speak of, as you are lucky you had toilet paper at all.
Well the Romans had a sponge on a stick.
Albatross!!
You are not going to do the Monty Python shoebox sketch are you Alisa! 🙂
I wish I could, but they have done it first. Anyway, when I was growing up, we used old (?) newspapers, neatly cut in squares, tied with a string and hung on the wall. Beat that, Sheryl! As you can see, recycling is old news, so to speak.
Maybe my pal in New Jersey could run off some rolls with foot-long single sheets?
Eat Crow.
Fifty million flies can’t be wrong!
My dad used to talk about the Montgomery Wards catalogs back in the days when the ‘bathroom’ was detached from the house. He said you always used the boring pages first.
Ouch.