You know what flourescent lighting? I hate you. I hate you as the eskimos hate the cold. You are ubiquitous, over my head, giving me this sickly white “make-me-look-like-a-walking, bloated-corpse” gloss over my exposed flesh. You are unflattering to all surfaces, and your color is the one I see when enduring blinding pain.
You are a disease that reminds me that I am wasting my life away, like a zombie damned to hell’s corporate dungeon. Your artificial shitty light is energy efficient I know, but to what detriment?
In the morning when I come in, I sit in darkness in my cubical until a braver employee comes in to flip on the switch, and then I shudder. Your fake light speaks to me at that moment: Wake up soul… I will crush your spirit presently.
In youth, I would marvel at your pervasiveness outside of my home, and come to detest your occasional flickers and maddening hum which echoed in my head all day long at school.
You represent all that is evil. You are nowhere that is fun. Where there is flourescent light there are chores being performed. Your influence over my mindset at work is Godlike; but before thee never will I beg or falter. I will declare a jihad against you and attempt to persuade my boss to install natural lighting in our office. I will attempt to disconnect you via the breaker box without electricuting myself. My dignity will prevail.
As a cattle marches to the slaughterhouse, I drive to work each day, in the midst of the ever-earlier pre-work sunrise, only to find darkness at day’s end.
Sun: Farewell for now. I will see you again come Spring.
Natural light: I will feel your warm glow when I get home.
A friend of ours is part of the Regency Ball society in the SF Bay Area. She met someone once who had gone to a great deal of trouble to make a regency dress (think Gone with the Wind) out of what she thought was a dusty rose color (that’s how it looked under the fluorescent lights in the store, and in her sewing room at home). By natural light, the fabric was…
<visions of “Joe vs. The Volcano” dancing in my head>
Brain cloud indeed.
I just love it when I turn on my monitor, and it’s set to refresh at 60 Hz, which just happens to be twice the frequency of the fluorescent cycle. Thus, the monitor flickers every time I move my head. I didn’t know headaches until I started working in this fluorescent hell.
It’s just great when the office manager decides that the soft white 4’ bulbs are distracting, and replaces them with blue soul-sucker tubes instead.
Good rant, Acco; I have to nitpick, though (because VarlosZ isn’t here at the moment); it’s spelled “fluorescent”. Every time I see it spelled “flourescent”, I have this picture in my head of a light bulb covered in flour.
Oh, that thing about fluorescent lighting being nowhere fun? So very, very true. I think we’re all being Pavlovian trained to become sad and worklike whenever we hear the hum of a fluorescent light.
I’ve worked in cube farms for years, so I too have been generously bathed in the unholy light.
One place I worked at replaced all its regular fluorescent tubes with ones that were color-balanced for daylight. Supposed to be more enery-efficient or something. Let me tell you, it was bliss. Not the same as sitting in front of a picture window to be sure, but miles better than the yellow-green hell of your typical four-foot glass rod of bile.
Have you tried installing a desk lamp with an incandescet bulb? Also, friends of mine swear by rose-tinted spectacles. They filter out the yellow, making things look better. Rose-colored, even. And they make you look like a hippie!
I live in a college dorm, and I lack the floor, surface, and outlet space for incandescent or halogen lamps. Candles are banned as a fire hazard. My room is said to be “on the ground floor” but this really means “in the basement.” My only access to natural light is a window near the ceiling.
Meaning that my life is illuminated by the fluorescent tubes provided by the university. Every. Waking. Moment. is spent under the glow of the Buzzing Helltubes.
Pity me, then kill me. No, wait, reverse those.
(On preview, I noticed that the phrase “fluourescent tubers” was probably incorrect but decided that it would be a hell of a band name.)
You guys must be ranting about the old magnetic ballast driven T12’s. The T8’s with electronic ballasts are much nicer than any incandescents. The phosphor blends are awesome, and you can get them in a lot of different color temperatures. They also use a quite a bit less energy per unit of light, so they save money.
Natural lighting is always preferable, but it is tough in wide based multi-story buildings, and the transmissive-holographic glazings haven’t really dropped enough in price to be cost effective.
Don beat me to it. When I was working as an electrician, the company had a contract with Walgreens to retrofit all the fluorescent light fixtures in all the stores in the area. We’d take out the hot-burning loud-humming magnetic ballasts and replace them with energy saving and quiet electronic ballasts. More light is given off using less energy. And since the electronic ballasts can hook 4 fluorescent tubes to one ballast as opposed to 2, money was saved by having to maintain fewer ballasts. The electronic ballasts are also ‘instant start’ as opposed to ‘rapid start’ so there is no flicker when the light go on.
Another benefit - when one tube goes out in the fixture, the other tubes stay bright, unlike the magnetic ballasts, when one tube goes out, the other dims.
Also as has been pointed out, there’s a variety of light colors to choose from.
this is one of my pet peeves too. I refuse to turn on the fluorescent light in my room in the dorm…i live by sunlight and my desk lamp’s light. Fluorescents just make me feel so grayed out and sick.
Our company is moving, and we will now be able to switch our lights on and off in our individual offices as we see fit. I’m planning on replacing my ceiling tile with high-reflectivity white, and getting a couple of torchiere-style uplights. No monitor glare, and a wonderful glow of incandescence.
I was having a great time at a gig in a local bar, until after the first set I went to the bathroom and after boggling at the color of the pee(I can’t believe THAT color came out of me!!!) I realized the problem when I reached the mirror and saw:
**Every single thing that had ever happened to my face!! :eek::eek::eek: **
I mean, there were scars, blemishes, yea lord even mini-zits all over my face :eek:!! I had no idea my face had been through so much.
::shudder::
It is truly evil stuff, this fluorescent lighting - I really didn’t want to see all that!
Luckily I was able to laugh it off and return to the stage as my normal, goofy self.
