hack

The building I work in is about two years old. Everybody tells me it must be so nice to work in a new building. Honestly, it’s not bad. There’s a kitchen on our floor now with modern refrigerators, two sinks, and a place to set up the coffee makers, and I have a window over my desk. So that’s nice. But the new building is just like the old building in one significant way: the heating sucks. You’d think modern technology would have come up with a way to heat a big building in the last fifty years or so, but no. It hasn’t. When the leaves turn and the winter winds begin to blow, everyone on our office starts dressing up in layers, and I’m not the only one who has a pair of gloves with the fingertips cut off so we can work our keyboards.

Then yesterday while I was drying my hands with a paper towel, I recalled how we used to hang damp paper towels over the thermostats at school to trick them into feeling colder than the already-chilly temps they were set at, and I wondered if that still worked. Guess what? It still does.