By now, we should all know that the Town of Warrenton is on a quest to become green by reducing our carbon footprint by 25% in the next several years. Well, until January 2nd of this year, I was sure I had beaten Mayor George Fitch to the game. You see, at the tail end of 2008, my family’s power bill had been low. Really low. Phenomenally, unbelievably, low… in an almost non-existent sort of way.
While others were worrying about the size of their carbon footprints, our family seemed to have undergone a collective, yet miraculously painless, carbon foot binding. (The ancient Chinese practice of foot binding, outlawed almost a century ago, involved breaking a girl’s toes to fold them under the sole of her foot, and then breaking the arch of her foot before binding it tightly to achieve the highly desirous, “perfect-sized” Golden Lotus foot length of…get ready… three inches. Ouch.)
How did we achieve such a tiny carbon footprint? I honestly don’t know. Perhaps our conservation efforts were finally paying off. The amazing thing was, we weren’t making any spectacular efforts – none that caused pain or demanded extra effort. No one was hand-drying the dishes. No one was drying clothes outside. I have yet to meet people who are so talented that their success has not been wrangled with a significant amount of hard work and sacrifice. Maybe I just don’t run in those types of circles. (Actually, the circles I run in are in my own home, generally looking for my keys, my children, or their shoes.)
Was it the time that I charged my six-year-old daughter a dollar for leaving her bedroom lights on? That may seem harsh, I know, but you have no idea how this little tyke is bilking me out of my pocket money.
Ages ago, while we were still a young family of home-schoolers in California, I would sit teetering high atop a barstool juggling math flashcards in one hand, and a nursing infant in the other. I know, could I possibly have chosen a worse picture of home-schooling to give you? But remember, this was in California, so the only weird thing was that I wasn’t also wearing roller skates and drinking wheat grass juice at the time. Despite my devotion to a good math foundation for our kids, my husband decided there was an element of danger that this type of mental math did not merit. He decided, in his brilliant, one-stroke way, that there was only one real solution to this problem. It was not to shorten the legs of the stool; rather, the two of us should write a “quick” program in Visual Basic to automate the flashcard process. Forget Mom’s Night Out as a break for moms with young kids; let’s sit at the computer and do a little programming with the spouse. (Don’t tell him that I enjoyed it – he might come up with some other assignment.)
This game keeps score in cents – a penny for every right answer, with one taken away for wrong answers. Ten years later, our younger children are still using that little program, and every once in a while, they will demand that I cough up a dime or a dollar, because they “earned it” on Flashcards. So my “charging” a dollar for keeping the lights on is as much a lesson in environmental awareness as a method of recycling Flashcard money.
So, was our family just ecologically gifted with an inherent knack for conserving energy? According to our power bills, our family had achieved a state of greenness that not even the humblest of hut dwellers could hope to attain. Our quest, like many Americans’ financial fortunes of the past decade, had met with success in a quick and pain-free manner. It is a rare thing in life to achieve such great results with so little effort, unless you are the progeny of a Hollywood star or a star politician, assuming that there remains any difference between the two.
Instant success should have been the first and most glaring clue that something was not right. If the tiny bills weren’t big enough to get my attention, the big burly man knocking on my door did. He had a new watt-hour meter that day in late November.
He had a sly smile and asked if I had noticed anything odd about our power bills. “Well, yes, they have been unusually low…” my voice trailed off. Right. He was going to have to momentarily turn off our power while he replaced our energy meter at the side of our house.
I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I have seen a crime show or two in my time. Even I know that a stranger at your door who offers to turn off your electricity might not be the best combination, especially when your big and burly husband is away. I studied the man’s work badge, hardhat, tools, and truck with the flashing light. He had the right outfit, and he knew about our anemic power bills. This was legitimate. And anyway, after our conversation, I was the one feeling like the criminal – inadvertently stealing power from poor Dominion Virginia Power.
Thanks to our new meter, and the diligence of the accounting people at Dominion Virginia Power, we received our first piece of non-junk mail of the New Year from them. This time, it would not be ignored: their bill, a calculation of all the power we energy hogs had most likely, probably, statistically used, based on their careful calculation, and then bloated by some mysterious multiplier, I’m sure, was $ 1,171.28.
Yes, that did get my attention. When I called to wail about it, the customer service representative chided me for being remiss. I should have noticed when our bills came in low, and complained immediately so they could have taken corrective action. I am lucky if I notice a burned out light bulb. It usually takes the tiniest person in the house to point that out to me.
The next person up the chain was a little more sympathetic. He took into account that we had one child off at college from about the time that the meter decided to take an early retirement. Were there any vacations? Yes, yes! We had been gone one for nearly ten days! There’s more energy that we weren’t ever billed for, but since we couldn’t have used it, there was more that we shouldn’t be billed for.
I searched my mind feebly. Hadn’t we spent weeks camping out in our backyards, living like hermits who had taken some electricity-free family vow? Sadly, no. Now I was really wishing we had been more conscientious and a little bit greener. There were the three weekends in a row that my washer was dead, and I had had to take our clothes to a Laundromat (another column ENTIRELY). My memory was working in full gear now, but there were no other mitigating factors I could produce.
The gentleman who helped me went back, recalculated, and came back with a slightly tamer number ($ 998.77), noting that the winter of 2008 had been milder than usual, so that should count for even more of less energy used.
We have six months to cough it up, so that lightens the load. In the mean time, I think we had better get serious about going green – just no so green that I look like the Incredible Hulk. Just don’t put a hammer in my hands the next time I pass that meter.
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