Mailing Lists I'm Proud of My Offspring, Part 1

I've been on a handful of U of A mailing lists since I started working/studying here; mostly technical lists for IT people. As with any online community, the long-running discussions that come up through these emails tend to imbue the authors' email addresses with a personality that may or may not jibe with the authors' real life personas. And although I'm sure some people actually glean useful info from these lists, I'm still subscribed more for the entertainment factor than anything else -- I generally ignore 95% of the chatter and tune in only when I'm specifically asked to, or when I see a juicy topic pass by that's just too good to pass up. This hands-off policy has gotten me a bit of a reputation for commenting rarely, and only to either add genuinely useful data to the conversation, or to steer it wildly (and deliberately) off-course; there's usually no middle ground for me.

I further reinforced this the other day when I started catching up on a too-long-running discussion about energy-saving measures we could take at the university, and whether more harm would be done than good by, for example, turning off computers at night (my favorite suggestion: we turn off servers on evenings and weekends; no more after-hours support duty!) Anyhow, it was a pretty typical discussion, until one of the admins, a self-described "confirmed auntie", suggested that really, if we were serious about minimizing our carbon footprints, we should all stop having kids. Or at least stop having so many.

Now, I don't know about you, but I've never really thought of IT as the "baby factory" demographic that it seems to be in this woman's mind, but apparently I and others in our happy little geek family are having way too many kids for her. I certainly don't care if she or anyone else decides not to have any children; it's great decision for some people, and it's one that I'm sure just about every parent has thought longingly about at 3:00 a.m. while scrubbing poop of their elbows. But it's none of her business how many kids I have, and more importantly she was doing it wrong. I mean seriously, how hard is it to derail a serious yet mundane email thread!? She tried, and failed.

My reply was that although Confirmed Auntie had gotten us off to an okay start, if we were really serious about environmental impact, we'd not merely remove ourselves from the gene pool, but from the CO2 emission pool as well...just stop breathing for a while, and see where that takes you, so to speak. Talk about becoming part of the solution, rather than part of the problem!

This had the desired effect -- while the thread continued for a while, I don't think I saw a single email after my that actually had anything to do with IT or rational, measured strategies to mitigate power use on campus (of course, the latter had died out long before I came along.)

Anyhow, I really didn't mean to get into all of that; I actually started typing with the intent of saying how proud I am of my two kids. The above was supposed to be a brief intro, a segue; not an entire blog post of it's own. But I'm already reaching my internal limit on this post (also, I'm hungry) so I'll continue later.