Wasting Money Rant

Warning: This post is not about the kids. The next one will probably be but this is pure frustration at the system as a whole.

So one day this week, I am quietly sitting in my room, getting a few materials ready for the students. The custodian comes in and says that he needs to replace the light bulbs. For those of you who do not know, I have two tracks of florescent light bulbs in my room and approximately 24 individual light bulbs in total. About four or five of those were dead. So I would assume that the custodian is here to replace only the light bulbs that have burnt out. It seems logical to me...

So he starts taking out all of the light bulbs, every single one. Even the few he just replaced last month. The majority of them were working just fine, casting light. He said he has to replace every single light bulb in the building with an energy efficient light bulb. So in some office somewhere downtown, this idea probably sounded like a good plan and someone signed off on it, thousands of light bulbs were ordered city-wide and distributed to the various schools and buildings. "Green" is good but not when it means tremendous amounts of waste.

All of the working light bulbs in building were merely thrown away! They were fine, sure they used a little more energy and cost a little more to run but the cost of throwing away perfectly good functioning items to replace them with "better" ones is ridiculous. Those light bulbs are either going to clutter up the storage closet at school, or worse clutter up some landfill somewhere.

Why not just replace the older lights with the newer ones when the older ones die? Why waste all that money and all those perfectly good lights?

And then today we are told that they "forgot" to pay us. How can you forget to pay some thousand teachers and move green light bulbs to the top of your list? I am sure these events are not related but both are equally frustrating.