Creepy From The Heat

It's hot in Texas right now. Matter of fact, it's been hot for weeks, looks to be hot for weeks more. Everything's bigger in Texas, even natural disasters.
   The upshot of all the heat is a surge in electricity use, mainly for air conditioning. In Texas, as opposed to Southern California, the hottest part of the day usually arrives about 5 PM, which is that sweet spot when offices are still occupied and yet people are going home and turning up the home AC. You can imagine how far into the red the power dial goes at 5:15. Luckily Texas is its own power grid, but with temperatures at 110 in Dallas, even the best Texas-built power grid is going to get some heavy usage.
   At work they've asked us to conserve electricity during the day. Since we don't store the electricity we don't use - no huge capacitors on the power grid - saving electricity at 9 AM doesn't help at 5 PM, but somehow I know if I point this out I'm going to be the asshole, the guy who's not the team player. So I shut up.
   The things they want us to do are for the most part things I do anyway, like turning off the lights in the bathroom and break room, turning off the computer monitors when I go home, that kind of thing. But they've also asked for more austere measures. Like turning off hall lights. Or even working in your office with the lights off during the day.
   I used to work around programmers, and some of them wanted the overhead lights off. They claimed it reduced eye strain. So does standing up and stretching for ten minutes every hour, and stretching isn't creepy. See, there's something gross and awful about sitting in a room with no lights on. I don't like it. My father used to sit in the living room with the lights off and watch TV and it just creeped me out to no end. It's what serial killers do, I'm convinced, in between luring college coeds into their windowless vans. Where there are also no overhead lights, not coincidentally. It brings to mind those horrible movies where the bad guy waits in the dark for the good guy to get home. Even cavemen brought torches into their caves, for God's sake, asking me to work with the lights off is asking me to flout fifty thousand years of civilization and common sense.
   Work has changed because of the dark hallways. The whole place is subdued now, and you never know when you walk past an office if the person isn't there or if they're just creeping out with the lights off. Makes me uneasy, like I'm the doofus in the horror movie who goes into the basement without a flashlight to check the fuse box. You just know the slasher is going to gut him like a perch.
   Maybe I'll bring a flashlight to work next week...