Irrelevant Cheetah

Lately I’ve been working some weird hours. Not to get into too much detail, but the offspring requires supervision, and so I’ve been working late into the night. I used to be a night owl, but I’ve been working early mornings for the past several years, and this switch back to late nights has made my circadian rhythms resemble something played by a drunken bongo player with Tourette’s Syndrome.

But I digress. As I was saying, I’ve been working late. This means that I’ve been driving home around midnight or one o’clock in the morning, and it so happens that my route home takes me by the local headquarters of BP, or British Petroleum, for you non-Alaskans. It’s a tall, 13- or 14-story building, situated on a nice tract of land, with lush lawns, ample parking for the peons employees, and with the company logo prominently displayed near the roof. And at one o’clock in the morning, every single light in the building is on.

Okay, so I’m using some poetic license. Not every light is on. There’s an office about halfway up on the southeast corner of the building with the lights off, but I’m convinced that office is occupied by one of the Mole People, and said Mole Person has removed the harsh fluorescent lighting from his office because it hurts his little Mole eyes and makes him squint, and then he looks like a lawyer, and he doesn’t want that.

But back to the Thousand Points of Light. The first night I noticed the lights on, I thought it was a fluke. “Perhaps they’re fumigating,” I thought, since I have always assumed that Big Oil naturally attracts cockroaches, and I went merrily on my way. I even think I whistled. But the next night, the lights were on again, and the next night, and the next, until it hit me like a brick wrapped in Egyptian silk: This company doesn’t care! In fact, they probably have board meetings on Monday mornings, where they all get together and discuss how little they care, and they have Johnson from Accounting stand up and give a report on how they could collectively care a whole lot less, if only every peon employee cared just a little bit less. Then they throw darts at a picture of Ralph Nader and tip over the Recycling bins on the corner.

It’s ecologically insensitive, of course. This is the same company that has those commercials on TV discussing “How oil companies can help solve the global warming problem” and even tells you in their ads that buildings can cause up to 50% of greenhouse gases!

But more than anything else, it screams at me “Thank you for paying three dollars a gallon for gasoline and continuing to buy impossibly huge SUVs like the Ford Continent, which comfortably seats eighteen NBA players! Your excesses allow us to snicker and keep our lights on at all times and thumb our noses in your general direction!”

And it does create more greenhouse gases. I think I would prefer it if they held a party – say, once a week – where they collected that week’s portion of their $80 trillion dollar quarterly profit in cash and made a huge pile. Then they could just have a great big bonfire, and invite everybody in Anchorage for roasted wieners. That way, I could feel like I’m getting something back, and it’d be better for the environment. And I hear that an Oscar Mayer roasted over a Benjamin Franklin is simply divine.

I’m emailing a link to this post to every email address at BP I can find. Feel free to do the same.