2007
Martin Melaver

Scream loudly and tread with a big foot?
  
At our annual retreat, we give out a number of awards to colleagues and partners, most of them serious ones having to do with our core values, continuing education, etc.  There are a few booby prizes, with the main one being the Bigfoot award to the staff member who contributes the most to our company’s environmental footprint (not the award you want to covet).  I won it this year.  Staring at me from the sofa across from my desk is a black and white pillow with a hairy Neanderthal creature rearing back with a taikwando kick and the word “Bigfoot” embroidered across it.  My colleagues love it.  Mr. Green CEO the worst polluter in the whole company.  It gets worse too.  With my constant air travel, it’s likely I will be the perennial winner until I retire, facing not just the smirks of colleagues for a long time to come but also a mountain of god-awful pillows clogging up my couch.

If you are old enough to know some of Bill Cosby’s early comedy routines, you might know the one entitled “Revenge,” involving a young alter ego of the comedian getting hit by a slush ball one winter by a kid in the neighborhood.  The young Bill Cosby makes his own slush ball, hides it in his freeze all winter long, plans step by step to get his revenge that following summer, goes to retrieve the slush ball one sultry summer day, finds that the slush ball has been thrown away by his mom, so he returns to the front stoop and spits on the original culprit.  OK, so it’s funnier when Bill Cosby tells it.

The point is Bigfoot here has been looking for revenge.  After all, it’s so much easier being defensive about one’s own practices than admitting one has a problem, right?

I’ll show them.

We had just completed an update on our company’s environmental audit, looking not only at Nox and Sox and various emissions created by our travel to work, to conferences, etc. but also at our use of energy, consumption of water, purchasing of office supplies (paper, pens, binders), production of waste.  Ah, there it was, our company’s real Achilles heel, the waste from all the drinks we were consuming: cokes and diet cokes and doctor pepper and sprite and diet sprite and yes even bottled water despite a perfectly good faucet AND a perfectly good water cooler.  Forget the 40 tons of carbon I was responsible for, 4 times the amount of any one else at the company.  Here was something crying out for reform:  Bigfoot wanted all this ridiculous waste reduced asap.

We put our best minds to work on the case.  The first suggestion was to do away with all of the soda cans and start buying large plastic bottles of each product.  Colleagues groused that the soda never tasted as good and might go a bit flat.  That suggestion was soon followed by the thought of installing our own small soda fountain in the break room.  We were half way down that road when colleagues started to talk about the shelf life of the syrup and about the mess it would create, yadayada.  And then Bigfoot had an idea.  We have a retail tenant the floor below our offices.  Why not use their soda fountain, contract with them to allow staff members to refill as much as they wanted?  It would give one of our tenants more business, not entail the purchase of duplicative resources, and do entirely away with the waste of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. 

Bigfoot was thrilled.  Less so his colleagues.  There was the matter of tromping up and down the stairs just to get a soda, several times a day.  And the mess that might be created on the long journey there and back.  And how about the opening and closing times of the retailer, which didn’t exactly mesh up to our own lengthy days?  And how would we serve the constant traffic of people who meet in our offices?  Hand them a cup and tell ‘em go downstairs and fill'er up?  The image seemed to conjure up Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant providing a urine sample for his draft board physical.  Bigfoot nevertheless instituted the policy over these countless objections, waving his pillow triumphantly and silently mouthing something akin to “vengeance is mine.” 

I can’t tell you the complaints I’ve heard since, mostly about the inconvenience of it all.  Lost in all the shuffle though are many other issues, more subtle, less humorous, more thought-provoking: issues about how little thought Bigfoot gave to things like health (and the consumption of sugar in sodas and the obscene amounts of water which soft drink production entails), or the opportunities for shared learning and shared leading that conducting an environmental footprint provide.  Learning about our consumption practices can indeed by an eye-opening and life-changing experience.  Bigfoot probably needs to consider his own abominable footprint before spritzing sodas in other people’s faces.