Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Last week, I read that the City of Seattle is considering banning cooking microwave popcorn in city buildings. Apparently a few times over the past few years, someone burned popcorn, setting off fire alarms, and causing entire buildings to be evacuated. The article claims that the Justice Center has been evacuated 8 times in the past 3 years.

It really annoys me that when there’s a problem, a lot of people jump straight to a full ban. Obviously this loss of productivity is worth preventing, but popcorn does have legitimate purposes. It’s not like microwave popcorn is only used to set off fire alarms. My guess is that microwave popcorn is popped properly hundreds and maybe thousands of times a year in the Justice Building.

If you think about the problem, you can see that the problem is the burning of microwave popcorn, not the actual cooking of microwave popcorn. So the proper solution would be to attack the problem: start with small penalties for burning popcorn and as necessary make it larger.

And to keep this in proper perspective, the Justice Center has 400 people in it. Let’s estimate that at least one person pops popcorn a day. So over 3 years of work days ( ~750 days), the 8 instances represents ~1% (8/750) of the uses causing major problems.

With this in mind, here is my solution:

1. Social Pressure: If someone causes the building to be evacuated, have the person send an email to everyone apologizing, explaining how it happened, and stating what they will do differently next time. It sounds a little childish, but it works great in software engineering for people who break the build. You could also have some traveling “award” for the culprit to keep in their office.
2. Monetary Fine: If the problem persists, impose a fine. Start at $100 and have it increase until the problem goes away.

Sadly, the people in charge of making our laws can’t come up with this sort of simple solution. Nor can they be bothered to actually investigate the problem. When asked (from the article), how this happens so many times, the city official said, “I really don’t know, I can’t answer that question for you.”