Today I received an email about Energy conservation tips - "A green initiative" as they called it. It advised us switching off PCs, monitors, lights daily while leaving the workstation - that would save about $500 per week per PC or about 400 KWH of electrical units per week per PC.
(Speech by former President of India and ace scientist was cited as supporting evidence for this calculation and justification) "...take time out to shut down the PC, and do some favor to the country and the organization" the email said in the end!
Well, I noticed and laughed at the small-but-significant trick in that last sentence.putting 'the country' before 'the organization' :)
People responsible for such cost-cutting initiatives do all such tricky and inexplicable things - hoping that putting 'national interest' ahead of 'company interest' will do any good to change people's habbit.
This reminded me of a recent funny incident. I was attending some internal training at my organization. The trainer was used to having tea/ coffee between breaks.
Currently a 'LEAN' initiative is going in my organization. So the Facilities team has reduced amount and frequency of Tea or Coffee served. Even worse - they have stopped keeping cups/ mugs to drink coffee. Now everybody is expected to buy their own cups.
The trainer was furious at this 'cost-cutting'.
"...I don't understand why do they do this? Can't they think of any better way of saving cost? Whenever the Facilities or Administration team is told to cut costs - the first thing they do is to remove cups/ mugs, reduce quantity of tea/ coffee served.or even worse: reduce/ remove toilet papers/ napkins. How much would they save like this? It would be peanuts.I mean think of something substantial.saving in thousands or millions of dollars." Everybody in the training started laughing.
The trainer continued, as if it was a monologue: "...but No! These Facilities people cannot think beyond tea cups and toilet papers.that is THE MOST IMPORTANT COST for them" Again a faint wave of laughter was heard.
"Really, I mean it.why remove TOILET PAPERS??? WHY?" Everybody burst into raucous laughter.he must have been sorely hit by absence of toilet papers - at wrong time and wrong place! It must have (literally?J) caused a blot on his otherwise clean image.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyways - back to the topic of discussion.what was it? Yes! Email about Energy conservation tips. And at the end of this email, there was a link to a search engine called Blackle (www.blackle.com ), touted as Energy conserving search engine powered by Google.
I visited the website and found that it was nothing else - except the Google search engine with BLACK background.and the screen mentioned - over 1 trillion Watt hours saved. So out of curiosity I clicked on 'About Blackle' link (
This post has some interesting comments.for and against such a move.check them out.
Here is the latest link from Google about the Earth Hour initiative: http://www.google.com/intl/en/earthhour/
...and Google's support to it: http://www.google.com/corporate/green/
No comments:
Post a Comment