“Turn Off the Lights!”

This morning I checked the laundry room on my wing of Ye Olde Folks Room and found it empty and not in use. Hooray!

I turned on the lights, chucked a load of laundry into the wash, and turned to go back to my apartment when I was faced with a dilemma:

Should I turn off the lights on the way out?

To those of us of the Boomer generation, that question answers itself. Our parents fervently drilled into us their ironclad rule, which we then passed on to our children, as well:

“Were you born in a barn? Turn off the lights when leaving a room!”

On the other hand, management wants us to leave them on. They believe having those lights cheerfully blazing away all day makes the place look brighter, leaving a more positive first impression on prospective residents that might be touring the premises.

“The place won’t seem too inviting when the rent goes up from leaving all those lights burning all day!” the residents grumble.

Alas, this ignores the primary reason landlords raise rents:

Because they can.

I doubt the lights being on vs. off would make that much of a difference to prospective tenants, but also I know that the fluorescent tubes in use in the laundry rooms really don’t cost that much to operate.

Our electricity ostensibly costs $0.12/kWh, but is really $0.20/kWh once various governmental entities take their cut. And the bulbs in the laundry room ceilings are only 32 watts, so let’s do some math.

Six laundry rooms in the entire building, times two lighting fixtures per room, two tubes per fixture… 12 hours a day… 31 days in a month…

Say, that’s only $58/month. That’s hardly going to break the bank.

So I shake off my Boomer sensibilities and leave the lights on as I leave, get home, set a timer for when to come back, and on my return trip—aww, you guessed it—the lights are off.

The same thing happened when I came back at the end of the dry cycle.

I live by a simple ethos: what will result in the fewest people yelling at me?

“I give up,” I mumble to myself, snapping the lights off on my way out.