Okay, I have to bitch about a paritcular hypocritical European, too. I could bitch about all hypocritical Europeans, without implying that all Europeans are hypocritical (notice the difference in emphasis?) but I have the feeling that that would go over a few people’s heads, so let’s just leave it at one hypocritical European of my aquaintance.
Blah blah blah, bloody Americans and your bloody SUVs, blah blah blah Kyoto protocol, blah blah blah blah . . . . This is what I listen to constantly. Not a week goes by without some kind of snide-ass, overgeneralized comment on Americans, comma, vile polluting ways thereof. There’s always a tacit “present company excluded, of course” in there, but it still pisses me off.
Especially since this guy never turns of his computer monitor.
You know how you can set up your screen saver so that if you don’t do anything with the keyboard or the mouse for X minutes, your monitor turns off? Know how you can do that once and never ever have to think of it again? I mentioned that to him. He said it was on. I said that he might want to check that, because I have never once come into the office and found his monitor off. Did he ever recall an occassion where he’d found that his monitor had turned off? Er, uh, well . . . Well, he apparently hasn’t fixed the problem. But even if there is some sort of pathological problem preventing the proper functiong of his energy-saving feature, d’ya know how there’s that button right there on the front of your monitor that you can punch when you’re going to be away from your computer, and the monitor turns off? And then you can hit the button again when you come back, and it comes back on?
For some reason, this guy is incapable of availing himself of either of these options. Every cotton-picking time I walk into the office and he’s not here, his freakin’ monitor is on, wasting electricity to display one stupid screensaver or another to an empty chair. He’s out of town for a week. If he doesn’t want to turn is computer off, that’s fine; he probably plans to log onto it remotely. But I came in Monday morning and found . . . you guessed it . . . the monitor was on, happily grinding away at a screensaver. Which it would have done for nine days while he was out of town. Burning fossil fuels, polluting the atmosphere, increasing global levels of CO[sub]2[/sub], not because he has chosen an unwise mode of transportation for himself and his family, not because dipshit politicians didn’t ratify the Kyoto treaty, but because he cannot reach out his very own personal finger and press a button that’s 2 freaking inches from the keyboard. I’m not saying that him turning off his monitor will single-handedly save the planet. It’s just the principle of the thing.
I turned off his fucking monitor. I’d have turned on his power-saver, too, but he locks his screen.
