Ideal Bite

In the strange litany of the many ways in which I contradict myself constantly, today's tip takes the cake.  Inexplicably, I have an almost-miserly feeling about printers and printing.  When Jen and I were raising money for Ideal Bite, and we had to print out fancy copies of charts and biz plans to give to people in powerful positions, I would have printed each copy in gray draft mode, if I'd been allowed to.  I stealthily set friends' and family members' printers to default draft mode whenever I borrow their machines, and often wonder how long it takes for them to realize it.  We all have our "things, and, well, print-efficiency is one of mine.

It's odd to me that the whole printing thing can affect me like a knife in the ribs, while I can sit through an occasional steak dinner without thinking too much about the ramifications of eating grain-fed red meat.  I just moved into a new place, and all my lightbulbs aren't yet CFLs, but show me a piece of paper that has a clean back side (perfectly good for creating grocery lists or printing boarding passes) thrown into a recycle bin, and I react much as if I had found a thousand thermometers and 47 batteries in a bucket full of parabens sealed in plastic bags and tossed into a landfill.  Give me a buggy printer spitting out multiple copies of the same page, and it incites a "small children are being murdered!!!" panic in me, and I can't scramble to the print feature or the power cord fast enough.  (And it really annoys me that the printer doesn't actually STOP when you hit "cancel," taking its time shutting down, like a scalding shower cooling off after you scream and flip it to cold.)

Clearly, I need to switch out those bulbs to CFLs, and thankfully, I AM really lessening the frequency with which I eat meat.

In the meantime, just don't go tossing out any single-sided printing in front of me if you know what is good for you.

-Heather... off to enjoy a last day of meetings in LA...

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