With the summer solstice upon us and daytime temperatures in Not-Bielefeld cresting 30 ºC, the University of Not-Bielefeld, and specifically its Department of Building Management, sent around an e-mail the other day with some tips on how to survive this heat wave.
(Ok, 30 ºC might not sound like that hot to a lot of people but around here it actually is. Even my wife, who comes from Croatia and is spending her first real summer in northern Germany, said that it’s bloody hot. And this is coming from a woman who had never turned on the AC in her top-floor apartment in Zagreb until she met me. In any case, 30 ºC is warm enough around these parts to generate a red warning for heat, thereby making it almost as fundamentally unbearable, if not absolutely life-threatening, as a yellow snow advisory.)
Even if it was well meant for a change, as with most e-mails coming from central admin of the University, this one was not particularly helpful. The tips ranged from the patently obvious (e.g., drink lots, wear light clothing, pull the blinds down, …) to those more importantly absolving the University of any real accountability (e.g., any cooling devices must be bought privately or that the University is not responsible for determining if the workplace is too warm to justify any time off). However, given that the latter class of tips amount to hand washing, it could simply be the way in which central admin cools itself off because, according to the University, this represents another way to beat the heat when done under cold water.
Also, remember that we are again talking about an institute of higher learning here. Therefore, I’m seriously hoping that most of the university community has already learned that rubber boots and thick wool sweaters are not appropriate summer attire. Even in northern Germany.
That being said, even less helpful is that none of this unhelpful information is in the actual e-mail. Instead, the e-mail only provides a link to a webpage where it is all listed. This might or might not be a good thing. On the one hand, the e-mail is short, making it that much easier to determine just how unimportant it really is. On the other hand, the webpage containing all this proprietary information is only available to University members for some bizarre reason, meaning that we have to log in to the system with its even more bizarre implementation of two-factor authentication (2FA) to read it. (For those readers who are also unwilling to click links, the long story short is that University’s IT Department invented 6FA insofar as you have to go through at least six separate webpages to log in to the system.)
Or, in other words, by learning how to cool yourself down, you are actually helping contribute to global warming through needless energy expenditure.
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