...NOT! Reading about President Obama's energy saving initiative got me thinking about another one.
I was a newbie federal employee during the Carter administration, and Jimmuh would not let us turn the thermostat above 65 degrees in winter or under 78 degrees in summer.
Now I can handle 65 at home by simply putting on more clothes. But you can't wear gloves and type and that was my problem at work. I was in a professional series, but we had no secretaries (the very word elicited guffaws from management) and so we typed our own stuff. At the time, being a backwater location, we still had a lot of manual typewriters and carbon paper, and I remember how hard it was to bang at those keys with frozen fingers. A real pain. It sounded like a lot of typing was going on, though, mainly because of the electromechanical calculators we had, which sounded like machine guns going off as they chattered out an answer which you read on little revolving cylinders like an odometer. I had the hardest time reading those things because I never was quite sure where the decimal was.
One young woman in our office was a narcoleptic. It was not unusual for her to fall asleep under the best of circumstances, but at 65 degrees, it was a given. She wore sweaters, knit caps, and those fuzzy house shoes, to no avail. I remember one day the district director came to our port office and approached her with a question. I was watching as he stood beside her desk waiting for an answer. She never opened her eyes, looked up, or even nodded. She was out like a light. I will never forget the puzzled look on the DD's face. He was accustomed to heels snapping together at the very mention of his name. That was priceless. She later quit and became an attorney. I often wonder what courtroom temperatures were like.
There were no air conditioners in motor pool cars when I started work (and I was in Texas). There were no radios either. The government actually paid whoever made those pieces of junk extra to remove the radios. No frills or even the appearance of a frill. I will never forget what a Teabagger-before-his-time said in a congressional hearing where air conditioning was discussed. "Next thing you know, they'll want a cold six-pack in every car." Yeah, well he was right about that, but we never said it out loud.
There was a source of office heat, however. We had this first generation photocopier that required that you sandwich a heat sensitive film between your original and the copy paper before you lifted the lid on this machine that otherwise looked pretty much like a real copier and laid your sandwich down, closed the lid and pushed "the button."
This thing literally burned the image of the original onto the copy paper. After it beeped or you smelled smoke, whichever came first, you lifted the lid and felt a rush of warm air. You then peeled the sheets apart, threw away the film, and marveled at the march of technology that produced this scorched masterpiece. In those days we didn't gather around the cooler. We gathered around the Thermofax.
Ah, those were the days.