Try This Cool Click Bait Trick To Reduce Your Energy Bills

12th Sep 2022

Don’t know if you missed it, but Autumn hasn’t turned up this year. It feels like we went from summer straight into winter and skipped a season. One minute we were all balmed out under blues skies down in Myrtl’a til half eight at night showing off our cider bellies, the next minute we’re in a queue to buy our third umbrella of the week and turning on the lights at lunchtime.

It has been hard to avoid the national media’s relentless siren wailing about soaring energy bills over the last few months. With no end in sight to the war in Ukraine, the warnings started coming in August, but because we were having such a daycint summer it seemed like a world away.

Now that winter appears to have arrived early, the lights are going on earlier too and the evenings are closing in on Leeside so suddenly we’re all starting to think about how we can keep the bills down.

An after-dinner ‘energy summit’ where bills, newspaper articles about the cost of them and, possibly, hurleys are being waved frantically at the more flathúlach members of the household, may be required.

This is bound to lead to domestic tension as differences emerge between house mates and family members in the level of frugality they believe necessary to keep energy costs down. Shouts of ‘you take way too long in the shower!’ will be countered with ‘sure you use the hairdryer to heat the bed before you get into it!’.

Reaching a compromise with both extravagant spendthrifts and the genuinely dim, will require Simon-Coveney-Dealing-With-Brexit-Nonsense levels of patience in gafs all round the People’s Republic this winter.

At PROC’s Command and Control Headquarters, we have experimented with several methods and incentives to remind our fellow revolutionaries to shape up on the auld energy efficiency. Every euro saved goes towards more barbed wire for the county bounds.  

To be honest, the first few weren’t effective – we realised that holding meetings in complete darkness to save on lighting costs means colleagues can’t see you rolling your eyes when they present a new idea to help Cork achieve independence from the Dublin Free State. Plus, when a Cork person says ‘I would yeah’ you need to be able to see their facial expression to be sure it is being said sarcastically.  

That wasn’t the only fail. A suggestion that everyone shaves their heads to reduce hairdryer use went down like a lead balloon for two reasons.

Number one: old dolls and their hair. Don’t even go there, feen.

Number two: if you’re trying to convince other Corkonians that your political ideology of independence from The Pale isn’t that of some extreme right wing or left wing group of complete loolahs, a bunch of shaved heads isn’t exactly going to put them at ease is it?   

With Cork’s washing machines and tumble dryers about to turn into money gobblers this winter, reducing the numbers of washes per week seems like a good way to keep bills down. Having less showers and shorter showers stops the meter spinning so quickly too. The downside of us all wearing grubbier clothes and going around with festering armpits of course is the inevitable bang off everyone.

So you have to choose between having your bank balance being bludgeoned or your reputation as a hygienic human being obliterated.   

Maybe, with enough marketing spin, as part of the Dublin gubbermint’s information campaign to promote energy saving they could make being smelly ‘cool’.

Perhaps an environmentally conscious sports star or some deeply annoying celebrity Instagram eegit could be given enough coin to make videos convincing their followers that a weekly shower on a Saturday night is all you need to stay clean, save the planet and reduce the country’s energy consumption. That would also have the benefit of making sure data centres have enough power through out the winter so the public can watch their irritating videos.

Our most effective energy saving scheme to date though has been the least sophisticated. Cutting out pictures of Vladimir Putin’s head and sticking them next to cookers, dishwashers, sockets and light switches has proven to be extremely effective.

Seeing that langer’s small baldy mug every time you go to turn something on will make everyone in your gaf think twice about where a lot of the money we pay for energy ultimately ends up. And if you don’t fancy a war criminal’s ugly mug looking at you every time you go to turn on the heating this winter, guilt-tripping notes like ‘Press to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’ work wonders too.