I received a phone call yesterday from an employee of Duke Energy, our local electric provider. The lady on the other end of the line wanted to ask me a series of questions in order to better provide our business with “incentives.” I normally don’t take that sort of call – such time wasters to take a survey, which is what it turned out to be (under the guise of offering us special incentives).
Three questions into the survey, it was obvious to me that the purpose of the call was to make sure our business was being “earthy friendly” and “green,” doing our part to save mother earth. I fully appreciate our planet and all of its beauty. I do my part to not litter and think outside of myself, but I’m not the bleeding-heart-save-a-tree-worship-the-environment-SUVs-are-evil type. I leave that work to Algore – he’s doing a fine job all by himself.
The lady was wasting my time and desperately trying to make me feel bad about using standard light bulbs in some of our building’s fixtures. I was about to hang up and get back to work. But then she asked the recycle question.
“Do you recycle?” she inquired, using a tone of voice that implied if I didn’t recycle I was personally destroying planet earth all on my own.
“Yes,” I said, “We recycle everyday.”
“What do you recycle,” the lady asked. “Bottles, cardboard, cans?”
“Well, we do recycle those things, but mostly we recycle cat hair,” I told her.
There was a long pause. I thought maybe the phone call had been dropped or maybe she had hung up on me for being a smart ass.
“Cat hair?” she asked.
“Yep, cat hair. Lots of it.”
“May I ask what you do with the cat hair?” the Duke Energy employee asked.
“Certainly, We send it to a lab that uses it to make allergy shots for my fellow citizens of this great planet,” I explained.
“Oh,” she replied. And then there was another long pause. Then she said, “Thank you for your time,
Mrs. German.” And then she hung up.
She’s probably still wondering if I just made that up to mess with her. I may not save every pop can from ending up at the landfill, but I do my dead level best to keep as much cat hair as possible from cluttering our planet. And as an added bonus, a good many allergy sufferers find some relief.
A few years ago, when I had more time in my days, I also reused the clean cat hair – to make handbags. All in all, I’d say we run a pretty good recycling program,
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