Thank You Big Brother

We are reminded to be thankful for government, because among its many helpful functions is the posting of signs that warn us not to drink from the urinal.

Chandler's new City Hall comes with some features that have municipal workers and visitors scratching their heads. Like the restroom signs that tell people not to drink out of the urinals and toilets.

A few employees have been cracking jokes and speculating about what it would take to make them slurp from potties when water fountains and sinks are a few feet away.

The environmentally-friendly five-story building uses recycled gray water from its cooling system to flush the urinals and toilets. The notices disclose that. "There's a lot in this building that's so new and different; it's exciting stuff," Dunn said. As an aside, he said his private mayor's office restroom doesn't have a don't-drink-out-of-the-toilet sign.

Allow me to restate. One, the government believes it is necessary to post signs telling people not to drink out of receptacles where people urinate or defecate. I would think that most people don't need this sort of instruction, regardless of whether the water used to flush said receptacles is potable or not. Two, government officials are exempted from their own regulations.

Don't get me wrong. I think using gray water is a great idea. It's a wonderful way to conserve water. If it was used in office buildings and hotels millions of gallons could be saved. (For the uninformed, gray water is water that is collected from sinks, air conditioners, roof runoff, and the like, and used for non-consumption purposes like irrigation or flushing toilets. It may or may not be minimally filtered and processed. It is not waste water from kitchen sinks or toilets. That is black water, and goes into the sewer system. I learned all this when we installed a rain water capture system for our house, which I'll discuss sometime in the future.)

However, I remain unconvinced that we need a government agency to prevent us from lapping water from the toilet like some sort of two-legged dog.

Workers also are getting used to the building's energy-saving "light harvesting system." It's set up with light and motion sensors so if there's enough illumination from the sun or if offices and meeting rooms are empty they shut off. Marian Norris, assistant to the city manager, said the motion detector shutoffs save energy by extinguishing lights when workers leave their offices and forget to flip the switch. But crews are adjusting the system because it has been shutting off lights when people are working but are too still. That happened during a recent City Council subcommittee meeting that prompted one official to jump out of his chair and walk briskly around the table just to bring the lights back.

The university where I teach has a similar system. It's a giant pain in the butt. The damn lights are always going off in the middle of conferences with students or while I'm grading papers. It's reached the point where I've put a small fan with paper streamers in front of the sensor. The fluttering streamers are active enough to prevent the sensor from turning off the lights.

The same university has banned personal coffee-makers in our offices. The stated reason was that we have a break room, and should make our coffee in there "in order to conserve energy." No one in the administration has yet been able to explain why it takes less electricity to brew a pot of coffee in the break room than it does in my office, but "rules are rules."

One final comment on the restroom signs. The story comes from Chandler, Arizona. As we all know, AZ has a problem with illegal immigrants, mostly of the Hispanic persuasion. Yet the warning signs are in English only; there are no signs in Spanish. This is an obvious case of racism...