Paper Plate Dilemma
Yesterday, I was standing in the caf, at the self serve bar. There was a girl standing next to me eyeing up the pastries. She grabbed one and then proceeded to look for a plate. Directly in front of her were a stack of paper plates. She eyed them up for a moment, but you could literally see the years of environmental-recycling-global-warming-etc. education going through her head. She hesitated. She looked around for a glass plate. There were none within 10 feet of her. However, about 11 ft away there was the home style counter, where she could have asked for a plate, and across the caf there was the salad bar where she could have grabbed her own. Or she could have just held the pastry in her hand.
What does she do?
She grabs the paper plate. Such is the laziness of man kind.
Sometimes I wonder if we are ever actually going to get anything done, when we are so lazy we cannot even walk across a room in order to avoid the dreaded paper plate!
2 Responses to “Paper Plate Dilemma”
I think that we (humankind in general) will always be too lazy, man`s nature is to look after themselves first. The only hope is to offer incentives to stopping the laziness… for instance charging people who use paper plates more than those who use glass ones. The other thing we can do is make being good more convenient… all would have been avoided if the self-serve bar has a stack of glass plates right there. I don`t think that it is a good thing that we are all lazy… I just think it is a fact about humankind that those trying to create change have to work around.
I think your observation brings up another important issue: why didn’t you (not to rag on you in particular- I’ve totally been guilty of this) point out the glass plates to her?