Chilling, literally

Today on campus I'm torn between saving the College money by keeping my space heater turned off and, on the other hand, turning the space heater on so my fingers can stop shivering enough to hold a pen. What both hands really need right now is to wrap themselves around a big mug of hot coffee.

The weather has turned and 'tis the season to agonize over how uncomfortable I am willing to become before turning on the space heater in my office. Space heaters are, of course, outlawed, but we all have them because sometimes the Bob Cratchit fingerless gloves aren't enough. I can't turn on my space heater, however, without going through a complicated calculus balancing my need to be warm against. my need to avoid feeling guilty. 

If I'm wearing two sweaters plus a scarf and huddling under a blanket but I'm still too cold to think clearly, then I ought to be able to turn on my space heater, but I worry that that little bit of extra electricity will cause the College to tip from budget crisis mode to full-blown Budget-Pocalypse. I don't want to be responsible for The End of the World as we Know It.

A whole new level of guilt arises if I turn on my space heater without first checking whether my colleague across the hall has turned on his, which may blow the circuits for this whole side of the building, and since no one in the building is authorized to reset the circuit breakers, we all have to wait, powerless, until an authorized employee comes over from the Physical Plant to reset the circuit. I don't even want to think about how much all this is costing.

On the other hand, I don't want to think about how cold my hands are every stinking minute of the day, and I don't want to have to keep my arms hovering a few inches above my desk because the desk top feels like a block of ice, and I don't want my feet to get so cold that it takes the whole drive home with the heat on full blast to take the chill off.

So if I say I'm just chillin' on campus, it doesn't mean I'm relaxed. It means the part of me that craves to be warm is waging a fierce internal battle against the tiny internal Puritans who insist that frugality is the highest virtue and suffering builds character. One of these days I'm going to wield my space heater as a weapon to beat all their tiny little Puritan heads to a pulp. Maybe then I can relax.