Tamara Harbar

Going Green

 Sometimes people have irrational fears about simple, harmless things – that’s what makes the fears irrational, of course. Sometimes even small steps towards going green can trigger anxiety.
Take reusable bags, for instance – or don’t take them, which was more like it for one friend of mine. She worried people would think she’d shoplifted if she used reusable bags.

Another friend refused to recycle empty cat food tins, convinced they’d emit odours that would attract the wrong kind of houseguests, even after he washed them.

Both my buddies got over their irrational fears. She takes reusable bags shopping (no shoplifting charges). He recycles empty cat food tins (no odours or pests).
So I decided to face my irrational fear – online billing.

I knew online billing saves on paper, which saves trees for birds. And birds can use every tree they can get, what with habitat loss being a major problem. Signing up for on-line billing isn’t hard, either, just a few clicks on the computer.  

So what was the psychological glitch, I asked Myself.

It turns out Myself thought the computer would crash or the internet would go down. Then I wouldn’t get my bill and would miss making my payment. I reminded myself I send and receive emails just fine…well, sometimes it takes hours for one to arrive and some people say my emails never get to them and once an important email landed in the spam folder … uh-oh, hyperventilating like this can’t be good…

Okay, look at it this way, I told Myself, I’ve been paying bills online for years. If the payments make it through reliably, then the bill will be delivered reliably, too. Right?

Myself and I agreed to try one e-bill. I opened the Union Gas website. My face scrunched as I clicked on “Register,” and there was a sinking feeling in my gut as I filled in the required data fields. Username: paperlessbillingwuss. Password: terrifiedfornorationalreason. Hey, if the shoe fits.

I don’t know what I was expecting when I hit the “Submit” button, maybe an explosion, or tectonic plates moving under my feet, but nothing worse happened than the computer rejected the password I’d really selected, “cringingalltheway.”  

After I registered, a colour-coded chart-graphy thingy appeared on-screen. The bars showing our household’s monthly usage looked like sticks of candy. I got to play – I mean, pull up all kinds of interesting information. When I scrolled over each bar, the bill date, date range, dollar amount and usage amount magically materialized – no shuffling through disorganized mounds of paper first. I compared the last three Januarys effortlessly, what we’d paid, how much gas we’d used.  

The moral of the story is clear: my irrational fears can be soothed by interactive colour-coded chart-graphy thingys.  

A couple of weeks later, an e-mail in my inbox told me to sign into my online account to view my bill. After I’d paid up, I clicked the “Payments” tab and a record of all my paid bills popped up. Cool.

I started ripping the plastic out of the envelopes of the paper bills I’d also paid. One envelope had a message on the back: “Go paper-free and save a tree. Together we can reduce paper use,” followed by the web address to register for an e-bill. My newly rational self headed to the computer.