Conundrum Mystifies Senses
- Published: January 31, 2006, By Yolanda Simonsis, Associate Publisher/Editor
Editorial
Can someone please explain a mystifying conundrum that recently has crossed the line of sanity? Surely I’m not the only person on this green earth who is confused.
This morning I awoke to some heartening news when my clock radio went off. Exxon Mobil experienced record profits this year-—even better than last year, which also was a record breaker for the company!
After dressing in my three layers of house clothes (appropriate couture for a typical Chicago bungalow built in the 1930s), I started answering e-mail messages from my home office and finally got down to business.
“It’s time to hammer out that editorial,” I told myself, “or Claudia will have my hide!” (Not really, but we all like to kid her about being a tough managing editor.)
Well, the longer I waited for the muse to strike me (I’m being facetious, if you can’t tell), the colder I became.
Now, my husband and I keep the house around 69 deg F. Our daughters hate it, and my mother and nearly 98-year-old grandmother rarely visit because they complain it’s so cold in our house.
We simply tell our daughters to throw on another sweatshirt, and we go to my mother’s house to visit on a weekly basis where they keep the thermostat at a sweltering 73 deg F. (And they have the heating bills to prove it!)
As I write this editorial, the beds of my fingernails have turned blue—and the radiator is right in back of my chair! We’re fortunate in that, as old as the house is, we’ve insulated it well, and we face south, so the sun is a great radiant heat source—if it happens to show its face. In addition, Chicago has experienced 40 days of above-average temperatures.
Like many other families out there, my family has pulled in the belt a notch or two because it’s the American thing to do, and we’re thankful we have a house that hasn’t been blown away or ravaged by flood or fires.
Others have lost track of the number of times they have had to pull in their belts.
That early morning “good news” definitely had turned sour by afternoon.
So here’s what the Associated Press had to say on January 30 about Exxon Mobil’s record earnings: “Exxon Mobil Corp. posted record profits for any US company on Monday—$10.71 billion for the fourth quarter and $36.13 billion for the year—as the world’s biggest publicly traded oil company benefited from high oil and natural-gas prices and solid demand for refined products.”
Author Steve Quinn added: “Exxon’s profit for the year was also the largest annual reported net income in US history, according to Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst for Standard & Poor’s. He said the previous high was Exxon’s $25.3 billion profit in 2004.”
Am I the only one outraged by this news, or am I merely not interpreting correctly?
Please illuminate this thick head of mine and tell me: What’s wrong with this picture?
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