#42 Always On

Ever since the fifties, when electricity became widely available, the powers that be have been pushing us to consume it like there’s no tomorrow. Hydroelectric dams, coal-fired steam turbines, and nuclear plants galore have all churned out the happy and useful electrons and pumped them onto our nationwide grid.
A little known fact about electricity is that it’s a use it or lose it proposition. If we all started conserving tomorrow, many of the power plants would simply have to cut production. Darn. And what would we do without all that coal smoke and radioactivity? See, there ain’t no big rechargeable batteries sitting somewhere holding power for us during light times and squirting it back out during the air conditioner season. Nobody’s ever been able to, or had the incentive to, invent such a system. The closest thing we have to power storage is potential power storage. Dams. So, in case you’re wondering, we probably won’t see ancient salmon runs restored anytime soon. Damn.
An unrelated environmental factoid. If we all got new tires today, we’d save as much oil in fuel economy as all the estimated reserves in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But guess what? The Les Schwab lobby isn’t nearly as effective as Exxon’s. Too bad, cause as far as I know, Les Schwab never crashed a boat into Alaska and spilled jillions of gallons of tires all over its pristine beaches either. Where was I?
Oh yeah. The society of consumption. I fight a losing battle trying to get my kids to turn off things. They got to have the radio on, the TV running silently, the computer fired up and ten Instant Message windows sending pubescent chit-chat back and forth. All the while with a phone wedged between their shoulder and head. They’ve begged and pleaded with me to get a headpiece earphone phone but I’ve resisted. Them getting a crick in their neck is the only weapon I have to curtail phone over-usage. As it is now, a relative can die and be buried before anyone can get through to tell me about it.
Still, when you hear the ads from the cable company about high speed broadband, the biggest part of the pitch is not having to wait for a dial-up connection. “Always on,” they say. As if that’s one of the levels of heaven. To my kids that also means the computer should be “always on.” They’re not alone. Lots of people like to have their computers always on. I, for one, turn mine off when it’s not in use, being from the “fire it up only when you use it” school of life. People say, hey Funny Guy, think of your computer like a refrigerator. It’s always on and you only occasionally reach in an get something. I say, think of it like a car. You only turn it on when you’re going somewhere. I think my analogy works better. Cause computers are mostly about words. And not only can words take you somewhere, they don’t need to be chilled to preserve their freshness.
And if turning the damn thing off means saving power, and a couple more gallons of water behind the dam, all the better. Someday I might be thirsty.
America, Ya Gotta Love It.