Competitiveness

As much as some people would like to ignore it, human beings are competitive by nature. It’s the smart ones that clue into this and take advantage of it. Our power company has done just that. Once a quarter now, in addition to their regular bill, they send out a “power use analysis” which essentially tells us how our usage compares to 100 other homes in our area. We are currently sitting around 24th place.

For a family of five in a 2300 sq ft. house I figure that’s not too bad. Our neighborhood has a fairly wide variety of house and family sizes. I’m not sure we could do much better without some significant renovations to the house.

But the family has decided we want to be number one. I suppose it’s not a bad goal. We do have a tendency to leave lights on in rooms we’re not using, or use too much light in a room at times. But there are times it gets annoying.

What is particularly clever (and frustrating) about this little competition our power company is fomenting is that we have no idea who those supposedly doing better than us are, and by how much. Is it even possible to become number one without going to bed as soon as the sun goes down and never using our oven? Or is that one less light in the kids’ room really going to make all the difference? Is number one that single guy living in the small house on the corner who seems to almost never actually live there? Could we ever hope to compete with him?

My wife doesn’t appreciate my jokes about sneaking around at night plugging space-heaters into our neighbors’ outdoor outlets. Surely she doesn’t think I’m serious. I mean, without more information we’d have less than a 1 in 4 chance of sabotaging the right people.

Perhaps the best course of action is sneaking around at night checking meters…