At work we've been going through
Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), because it's not a
corporate fad without a certification process to cash in on it. And
I do mean
cash in,
dues are
$5,000, and the various fees are charges are also measured in
kilobucks. We've budgeted $50,000 for the certification process,
because this is obviously far more important than a new HVAC
automation system or upgrading the elevator control system.
(Entrapments, which is the technical term for "elevator doesn't let
the people inside, out", have tripled in the last six months.
Which, you know, is
bad.)
Anyway, as part of the LEED cert process, we're been moving to more
efficient and lower mercury lamps. The 50R20 spotlights in the
elevators have been replaced with 45R20s, (First number is wattage,
second is base size, letter is base type) F8T5s are being replaced
with some low mercury lamp, and the building standard bulb, the
four foot FO32T8/730/ECO, has been replaced with the
FO28T8/830XP/SS/ECO3.
[239KiB .pdf] (Consumes four less watts, delivers the same light
output, has superior color rendering and hardly any mercury; and
shits unicorn giggles. It also costs four times as much as the
FO32, but hey, I'm not paying for them.)
And that's the rub. You see, I use a
lot of four foot
T8's. As in, sixty or ninety tubes a week. So it's only
reasonable that as part of a big Going Green initiative,
changing a big thing like the building standard light bulb, you
would
first check that our supplier had plenty of it in
stock. Right?
I placed an order for 240 bulbs on the 26th, and 140 of them were
delivered on the 24th. Of
July,
twenty-eight friggin
days later. And it wasn't even complete! It's kinda hard to
change bulbs when I don't have any bulbs to change them with,
guys!
But now I've got them, and everything's good! Except I blew through
two cases doing all the stuff I couldn't do until I had light
bulbs, which leaves me with not a lot of bulbs. And judging from
their performance to date, I'll be waiting another month to get the
next shipment in. And I'm running out of 45R20s, and FBO32/730s,
and CF13DS/835s...
All I got is problems!