April 4, 2001
Dear Everyone:
Last week, we thought we’d seen the last of winter, as we had some beautifully warm days. It was about 86º on my patio one afternoon. Then, the California version of a late frost: Temperatures plunged overnight into the 40’s (my God, it’s cold!) and I even had to reset the clock on my little bedroom heater to Daylight Saving Time so it would come on in the morning.
On the plus side, no worries about running the air-conditioning while simultaneously burning candles for light in the evenings. Not just yet, anyway. However, we have discovered one very real hazard to using candles: Big White Kitty.
Seems “Jeannie” had some candles burning on her coffee table one evening and Big White Kitty sauntered by, waving his big, fluffy rolled-in-something-white tail. Next thing, he wants to know why “Jeannie” is batting at his tail with her hands. No serious casualties, but I’d recommend either keeping open flames higher than tail-height, or investing in some glass lamp chimneys.
Also to report: The candle snuffer that I got last month works so much better than the metal coffee scoop that I had been using up to that time. For one thing, the snuffer has a much longer handle, thus reducing the risk of getting your fingers too close to the flame.
In other safety news…
There’s a new Safety Program going on at work. For the past few years, they’ve tried to encourage “safe work behaviors” with “Safety Cards”. These were not real cards, of course, but paper copies. Each “card” contained a number of boxes in which you could record (in very small writing) some safety thing or other that you had done. You could, for instance, record that you had attended some kind of safety training. Or that you had just had your annual physical.
Once you filled in three of the boxes, you turned your “card” in to your “safety representative” (someone on the “safety committee”). Each quarter, some of the “cards” would be drawn for prizes. Obviously, the more “cards” you submitted, the more chances you had to win a “prize”. Nevertheless, the same people seemed to win every quarter.
The new system relies less heavily on the element of chance and everyone can “win” if they really want to. Now, we get “Safety Stamps”. Everyone can “earn” as many “Safety Stamps” as they want, with the proviso that the number of qualifying actions has been curtailed. Now, for instance, only “serious” Safety Suggestions count. Recommending that stress levels be reduced by wrapping duct tape around the loudmouth in the next cubicle over is no longer considered a valid “Safety Suggestion”.
On the other hand, they have made certain activities Mandatory, so you win Stamps whether you give a huff or not. For instance, there are now Mandatory Quarterly Safety Meetings (worth 5 Stamps!), although voluntarily attending the monthly “Safety Awareness Meetings” may not count for anything. And what do you do with these Stamps once you acquire them?
Remember those Green Stamps your mother used to collect at the grocery store, then throw into a drawer in the kitchen? (Or maybe it was Blue Chip Stamps where you grew up.) Every once in a while, usually when it was raining and we couldn’t play outdoors anyway, Mother would let us fill the stamp books, licking page after page of stamps until your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth.
There was a catalog filled with “wonderful” things that you could get by redeeming your filled books of stamps. Same principle here. Only instead of books, you just have to acquire a certain number of Stamps. For instance, with 16-20 Stamps, you can get anything from the “A” Collection in the catalog. You could even get a nifty eggbeater, just like the one you can get at the drugstore for less than $5.00. How’s that for incentive?
I figure I’d have to “earn” about 160 Stamps to redeem an item worth something in the neighborhood of the $75 I spent on candles last month. At 5 Stamps per Mandatory Quarterly Meeting, it would take me 8 years.
On the plus side, these Stamps are self-adhesive, so I wouldn’t have to spend 8 years licking them.
Love, as always,
Pete
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