I walked into the kitchen at work this morning to be greeted by a brand new kettle plugged into the wall. What caught my attention was that it was glowing blue. Weird. It was Breville "Lightning". Its gimmick was that it glowed blue in standby and then turned red when the water boiled…

WHY??!! I am often lead to believe by the green-optimists that the world is full of manufacturers busily reinventing appliances to do away with the dreaded standby load…. Then, then THIS! Insult! What do the people at Breville think they are doing? I know – I have this great idea to make standby FUN? No kettle needs a standby function. So, what shall we give an an appliance with no standby power loss? Standby? All so it can glow blue when cold? Are people honestly that stupid?

I find this all very depressing. Which flat earth do Breville live on? This “green thing” is just another marketing niche isn’t it? They aren’t taking this responsibility seriously at all.

It is just one more thing I will have to turn off at the plug over and over and over and over again every time I go to the kitchen. And whilst I am on my high horse…

Being a shared service building that has been reconfigured over and over again we find all the light switches in one place – at the bottom of a corridor. Even if you can find the light switch main panel you have no idea which switch is for which room. They aren’t labelled. Even then, if you did know the right one it would switch lights on or off in adjoining rooms or corridor spaces. This is useless. Lights are left burning all day long in empty rooms through dumb design.

In one of the other buildings some light switches are in the rooms to which they apply. I used to keep turning them off only to find somebody turned them on and left them on. One day the sun shone in through the window rendering the light superfluous. I switched it off and got a drink…. A woman walks in after me and whinged “Who keeps turning the light off!?” and promptly put the light back on.

Oh I give up.