The other day I walked into the Hard Core Industrial Offender (HIO) lunch room to see employee A wandering between the recently new chrome coffee maker and the brand-spanking-new chrome espresso machine. She was aimlessly turning this way and that with a plastic bottle filled cardboard box in her arms. She looked confused. Where did the plastic recycling bin go, she wondered? She twirled around frantically - how could she recycle her PET? The plastic recycling bin had been moved...where? It was right there, she said, with a furrowed brow, right there where the new machine is! Can you believe that? she asked. Can you believe they moved the recycling bin out to put an espresso machine in? Ain't that something! You know, she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, we don't even recycle our cardboard boxes! True, she said. True! We throw them all into the trash! With that revelation my head started reeling - HIO uses more cardboard boxes in a single day than UPS ships in a year.

One Hardcore Industrial Offender actually Ride Shares with another employee who picks up a third from the metro station nearby. What a concept - the metro station?

Ride Share? Three people in one car? Think about these three lone pioneers! I know, I know, this is a simple idea long promoted by city fathers all across this land. Ride Share - more than one person in a car=fewer cars on the road=less greenhouse gas=less dependence on oil producing nations - even I know the story. Well, this simple employee had heard, obviously through gossip, that there are companies that encourage and actually reward their employees for Ride Sharing, sometimes even monthly, with - are you ready - Ride Share Prizes!

I guess this means prizes for the furthest ride shared, the most rides shared in a month, maybe even prizes in a company like ours for the very idea that someone actually gives a Green G-damned Shit. This employee, lets call her employee B, was thinking a $10 Wendy's gift certificate or a Wal-mart gift card - heady stuff I know. I also know she was thinking she might win. Most HIO's live in the upscale overpriced beach community that HIO headquarters in, having dedicated their lives and souls to the big idea, and they drive their luxury cars to the valet parking garage a-l-o-n-e, but yeah, some other suckers might also be mavericks and live far away in apartments next to other lowly HIO's with gas guzzlers and voila, fun competition! Let the green games begin!

So she did what she had been taught to do with an "innovative idea", she dropped her idea into the HIO Suggestion Box and she waited for a call from the Redeemers of the Suggested. I mean, she could actually see someone in "Upper Management" thinking it a genius idea and herself spending the prize money on a Wendy's burger. Perhaps she imagined herself strolling the gum aisle of Wal-Mart grabbing fistfuls of Bubaliscious without a worry. But mostly she waited. And guess what, she is still waiting. Three years later. She never got that call thanking her for her brilliance. She is probably lucky to still have a job.

Did I mention that we have purchased a sparkling new $5000 espresso machine? Oh, it's a beauty and it makes a great espresso/latte combo I hear and it is a wonderful bookend to the previously over-purchased coffee machine occupying the other end of the lunchroom. I am all for coffee, don't get me wrong, organic preferably, but did we really need two machines when there is a Starbucks two steps from the corporate front door, a Pete's four steps away and a Coffee Bean not far from that? I am fairly sure they don't recycle unless someone is watching and for that alone we owe them our dirty business. Loathsome.

Further Reading:

• Confessions of an Industry Insider: Nobody Does A Party Like We Do
• More Confessions from an Industry Insider
• True Confessions from a Hard-Core American Industrial Offender