I was only briefly part of it for a couple summers in high school. I worked for a temp agency, working short-term jobs (from a few hours to a few weeks) at small businesses and factories in my town. One stint in particular was where I learned two important life lessons. They may seem trivial on the face of it, but to me the were profound.

It was a bottle-filling factory, to put it simply. We tended machines that filled bottles and tubes with various glues, oils and liquids, then packaged them for sale and shipment.

Lesson #1: Stay Busy.
In my bottle-filling job, the machines were temperamental. They would frequently malfunction. The first time the machine I was on shut down, I simply sat and waited. Mistake. Within minutes, the boss came by with a putty knife and explained how to get glue off the floor. I felt insulted, until I looked around and noticed how everyone else on the line looked busy, even with the machine down. They cleaned, they stacked, they sorted until the machine came back up. Moreover, they were doing essential activities that were hard to keep up with when the machine was running. They remained useful. And employed.

That putty knife was my friend the rest of that gig. Anytime my machine went down, I was the glue master. I stayed employed at the bottle-filling factory while several other temps came and went. I only moved on when the entire temp force was released when the work dried up. At every temp gig after that, I made sure I kept busy when the machine went down.

In the temp world, staying busy is a survival essential. You are only employed for exactly as long as you are useful. The moment you are seen as no longer needed, back in the queue you go. And in today’s employment environment, every job is a temp job it seems, no?

Lesson #2 Use your freaking head.
Back in the bottle-filling factory, a group of us worked this one particular line for several weeks. I was the young kid, a fresh 18, waiting for college to start. The others on the line were older, in their 30s give or take, working temp jobs while awaiting a better gig. It was a fairly slow-paced and quiet machine, so we chatted while we worked.

I made a rookie mistake. Once again, the machine went down. Not wanting to look un-busy (see #1 above), I took to cleaning some of the tubes of product that had gotten dirty in the machinery. I found myself with a big box full of ones ready to go to the packer at the end of the line. The guy running the packer was kind of a mysterious guy. He looked like he probably led a pretty hard life outside the factory. We did not say much to each other, but we had mutual respect going after this long time on one machine.

I took the big box of cleaned product and dumped it on the conveyor belt. The big slug hit the packer and snarled up the system. The guy at the packer growled at me “Use your [freaking] head!!” All I could do was smile sheepishly and go back to cleaning.

The “freaking” part is very important here. He used a more…choice…term, but the expletive is what makes this phrase work. It conveys the exasperation at the sheer foolishness that not using your head yields.

Those four words stuck with me. I should have known dumping a slug of product would screw things up, if I’d only taken a moment to think about it. Life in general is like that. Think ahead about how your actions will affect a others, particularly those down the line. Miss a deadline, dump a project on an underling, finish something in haste that really needed more care, and you can bring down the whole line. In life, yack on a cell phone in traffic, hit your little brother with a toy, make an insensitive comment to a friend…all these things lead to trouble that could be avoided if you “Use your [freaking] head!!”

To many adults, these lessons seem trivial. But we are not born with the knowledge. I’ll bet you know an adult or two who never learned these lessons.

It may have been minimum wage, but my experience was gold.

Observe the graph, and you will see that the price of a first class stamp has remained somewhere between 40 and 55 cents in constant, 2007 dollars since 1971. (We are using 2007 dollars because that’s what the inflation calculator tool I used uses…and it’s a good frame of reference because we all have a sense of what 2007 was like financially, 2008 is still too new!) Once we get past the inflation spikes of the late 70′s, there’s one recent outlier in 1999 where it came in at 52 cents. Not sure what happened there. But aside from 1999, since 1985 it has been a very steady 41 to 45 cent range, and a very steady 41 to 43 cents since 2001.

I think the USPS is doing a pretty good job keeping costs reasonable.

Props to Five Cent Nickel’s post on the subject for the idea for this post.

This graph uses this Inflation Calculator . Postage data is from a graph linked in this news report

Another common argument against them is that if the CFLs happen not to last their advertised time, 6000 hours to 10,000 hours, then that additional expense has more than wiped out the gain.

Well, good news. CFLs have come down in price to the point where even if they fail well before their expected time, they are still cheaper to operate. Let’s run the numbers. 

Walmart.com recently had a national brand of 15 watt CFLs listed, in a 6-pack bubblepack for $19.32. This is about $3.32 per bulb. I have not priced incandescents recently, but let’s be generous and say you can find a 4-pack of the equivalent 65W bulb for about $1.oo, or $0.25 per bulb. (The 65W equivalency figure is from walmart.com’s description of the CFL.)

For illustration, lets use a figure of $0.10 per kilowatt-hour (KWH) for the cost of electricity, a typical rate. 

Let’s assume that the incandescent lasts its rated time 800 hours. If the incandescent lasts 800 hours, it will consume 65 watts for each of those hours, for a total of 52,000 watt-hours, or 52 KWH. That is $5.20 of electricity, on a $0.25 bulb, for a total cost of ownership of $5.45.

Compare the CFL. Let’s assume, just for illustration, that the CFL only lasts as long as the incandescent, 800 hours, and then promptly fails. Remember, the typical CFL is rated for at least 7 times that, but we’ll handicap it to prove the point. If the CFL lasts 800 hours, it will consume 15 W for each of those hours, for a total of 18,000 watt-hours, or 18 KWH. That is $1.80 of electricity, on a $3.32 bulb, for a total cost of ownership of $5.12.

Even if the “expensive” CFL and the “cheap” incandescent last the exact amount of time, the CFL is still cheaper!

This was not always the case. Back in the mid-1990s, when I first started buying CFLs, they were hard to find and cost $13 to $20 each. They saved energy and money, but it took longer to make back the investment. With prices as low as they are now, you absolutely cannot go wrong with a CFL–even if they only last as long as an incandescent. 

Remember, we were handicapping that CFL lifespan to prove our point. On average, CFLs last the advertised thousands of hours, meaning you can save so much money on  these things you should weep for joy every time you use one. They are THAT good…and THAT cheap. 

Note. A CFL contains mercury (about 5 mg or so), so a CFL that fails early is not a good idea because that increases the amount of mercury in the waste disposal system. You want your CFLs to last a good long time for that reason, too, in addition to saving you buckets of cash.

So let us list the things that we have done that we really did not have to if we had any sense. Or money.

1. Replace the siding on a house. This requires climbing on ladders, cutting things precisely, and handling big floppy pieces of plastic. We have successfully resided two house, thank you very much. It is actually rather satisfying, kind of reminds one of building houses with Lego, oddly enough.

2. Tune a piano. Oh, the professional tuners shudder when the lay person asks about tuning their own. I don’t blame the professionals. A good piano is like a baby; it needs constant, careful care to be healthy. Likewise it is very expensive when things go wrong. Naturally, a piano tuner does not want to see a piano get hurt. But you know, it turns out there really isn’t that much mystery to piano tuning once you have the tools. In the long run, there’s more to piano maintenance than just tuning strings, but for cheapskates with a piano, there is at least a little you can do.

3. Change the oil in the car. OK, lots of people have done this. And yes, we have too, but oddly enough, we don’t do it anymore. Because storing and disposing of the oil is a mess and a pain, even with a recycling facility nearby. For $20, its worth having someone else do it. We now leave this to professionals, or, in other words, it is something that we have done that we have decided we were not supposed to after all.

4. Shovel the driveway, rake the leaves, and push the mower. There are really only three seasons in America: Lawn mower season, Leaf Blower season, and Snow Blower season. All three of these items require expensive, loud equipment to do them the American way. True to our rebellious, cheap, self-righteous nature but slightly prone to compromise ways, we have managed to do without a snow blower and a leaf blower. And we have stuck to a push-along gasoline mower. We have a pretty good sized yard and a pretty big driveway, so this does come at a price. But we are healthier, and more smug, for it! Beside, when it really gets bad, the neighbor brings his snow blower over.

So, what have you done that you weren’t supposed to?

Well, he is right.

It is very unlikely that we could destroy the earth precisely because it is, indeed, so big. Even destroying all life is unlikely given the tenacious hold life has had in every conceivable nook and cranny of the earth. We have lichens on subzero mountaintops…bacteria in boiling springs…little ecosystems gathered around ocean-floor vents. And all hanging around through thick and thin for billions of years.

So, yes, predictions of the Destruction of the Earth^TM via global warming are overblown.

But this is a straw man. Climate scientists say no such thing. Rather, the concern is that global emissions may cause rapid, widespread, uncertain changes that will be difficult for the present set of plants, animals and people to adapt to in a timely fashion. Widespread damage to present ecosystems and economies will make life very uncertain for quite some time.

Oh, we’ll eventually come around. Humans will adapt (we live in nearly every habitat ourselves already, from the poles to the desert.) The plants and animals will, too (though the species may change.)

The problem is that it is very difficult to predict exactly what will happen. The kicker is that we would not have to bother wondering what would happen if we just did something about it now.

So no, global warming will not kill the earth. Nor all life on earth. And probably not all human life on the earth. But it might make it uncomfortable for a long time. Why go through that if we don’t have to?

Anyhoo, I puzzled over this for some time. I use my shuffle very little. It was working fine on a recent vacation. I laid it aside for a few weeks on my dresser. When I picked it up again, all I got was lights of death.

Here’s my theory. The only change in my iPod shuffle recently was the purchase of a protective silicone skin. Works well, though it makes the on-off switch on the back hard to use. As I put my replacement shuffle through its paces, with skin, i noticed that as I fumbled to operate the on-off switch that I was inadvertently pressing, even holding, the controls on the front at the same time.

Could the simultaneous use of the on-off and playback controls confuse the unit, sending it into the lights of death spiral?

Hmmm….

Ironically, if I blather on much longer, I will violate my charter before I begin.

So I’ll shut up now.