Management ordered Building Maintenance to turn down the heat to fight global warming and save the world. Employees complain they are freezing.
The maintenance guy uses a fancy electronic thermometer to verify the temperature is 68 degrees, precisely as ordered, therefore people can’t be cold. He is mixing units. Degrees are a measurement of heat activity, not of comfort. “68 degrees” and “chilly” are perfectly consistent descriptions of the same office space.
Americans have this problem on a broader scale, with politics. We don’t define what we’re measuring, so we can’t explain why we think America was once great and could be again, and why they think it was never great and won’t be until they replace it with something else.
Joe doakes
I think it’s more a matter of intentionally avoiding defining what we’re measuring.
Or maybe just a pandemic of virtue-signaling, with no practical purpose whatsoever?
I actually did a calculation of whether it would save any money to turn the heat down–keep in mind that yes, I’m a “keep it cool” person myself who loves sweaters. What I found is that the cost of having sufficient sweaters and the like to be comfortable at a low building temperature really exceeds the cost of turning up the heat in a well insulated building. Go figure.
I still keep the heat down, but it’s more because of health benefits to a cooler temperature, as well as the fact that when I need to go outside, it’s nice to have a sweater under my coat.
Freezing is the price you pay to fight global warming.
Don’t ask questions, hater.
bb, can you mention more about your to-heat-not-to-heat calculation?
bb
I would think that first year costs for sweaters and such would be high but if you’re purchasing good quality wools the subsequent year replacement costs would be minimal. Pendletons and Duckworth/Merinos will last for decades with a little care.
Get them dry cleaned as “mens” clothes its cheaper.
J. Ewing, if you’re referring to the run on space heaters at the local hardware store, I’ve been assured it’s entirely unrelated. Personal space heaters are not authorized (the building wiring wasn’t designed to be sufficiently robust for everyone to have one sitting under the desk because the building was intended to heat by furnace, back in the days when architects were cruelly indifferent to the fate of polar bears dying as ice caps melted). Neither are extension cords or multiple plug outlet strips like the one that’s not powering my computers and monitors, no sir, not me.
I suspect the next Fire Marshal inspection will be . . . interesting.
Regarding my calculation; my family of 8 lives in a home that takes about $700/year for heating. If I turn up the thermostat from 65 to 75, I probably add about $200 to that bill.
In contrast, if one needs to have ~5 nice sweaters (or Pendleton shirts) and replace them about once every ten years, that’s around $400 annually for my family. The way I justify my family’s expense not by heating savings, but rather by the fact that it makes it far more likely that we’ll get outside in the winter, and you’ve got health savings from that.
This should be in a bad paraody or sounds like a deleted scene in Office Space. Not something people need to deal with in reality. Leftism has killed comedy and paraody because nothing is too insane for them. I swear if someone went to SNL in the 70s 80s or even 90s with an idea for a skit making fun of this it would have been rejected, because no one is that nuts to consider this. Its as crazy as thinking boys who think they are girls should be allowed to run in races supposedly just for girls. Oh wait…
When my last job in MN got to he more trouble than it was worth, I quit.
Then it occurred to me that for the oast 10 years, I hated living in MN, and now nothing was stopping me from finding a job I liked in a state I liked…so I did.
Everyone has their own tolerance levels; you just haven’t reached yours yet. Get a sweater.
I’m old enough to remember when standard room temperature was 72 degrees. This was changed during the Carter administration, apparently by government decree, although I can’t seem to find where the constitution grants this power. Penny pinching Scrooge employers are equally culpable. People have been shivering at work ever since.