If I had gone to a grocery store yesterday evening, I would have noticed the Freak-Out gaining momentum as people buy up milk and bread in massive quantities(I've never understood why a Winter Weather Advisory fires the thing in people's brains that signals "I must get bread and milk quickly, for there's snow a-comin'"). As I drove through suburban Durham, I noticed people strategically parking their cars in strange ways and places to avoid the embarrassment and heartache of getting stuck in what was sure to be the second ice age that was on the way.
As I drove to Raleigh to teach a class at The Worx, I noticed that the major roads had already been covered in whatever space-aged agent they use here to prevent freezing. I was actually impressed. It seems that the lessons of a few years back when the entire city of Raleigh was crippled by one inch of snow* to the point that people were sleeping in their cars and in Chili's restaurants because the traffic on the roads was so deadlocked that they couldn't get home.
Still, I understood where we are and what the weather does here(never underestimate the power of one semester of meteorology at NC State) and tried to convince he who was bestowing the lap top that it was unnecessary to be prepping me for homework no matter what Winter Weather Advisory was in effect. My friend unswayed, I took the laptop home with the battery and mouse in my jacket pockets wondering how much it looked like I was making a poor attempt at equipment thievery.
Well, it's 7:30am the next day, and I'm in slacks and a button down shirt watching the news and seeing the two-hour delays that all the schools are granting themselves just to be sure that all the rain doesn't suddenly turn deadly. If I was going to be working from home, rest assured that I'd still be in my pj's and probably still in bed and waiting until 7:59 to get out of it and start my remote jobbing. Nope, I'm going to shut this computer down, get in the car, and drive through the rain to be at work just like I thought I would be.
Because the first Winter Weather Freak-Out of the year is always useless.
*There are some who say that it wasn't the one inch of snow that caused the problem but the sheet of ice that formed over I-40. They're wrong. What actually caused the problem was the entire city freaking out about that one inch of snow at the exact same time and putting way more cars on the road at one time than we could even come close to handling. Liddy Dole and Richard Burr, however, are under the impression that there's no reason they should seek any kind of funding for public transportation for Raleigh, though. It's not because they don't believe in pork. They totally believe in pork. It's because they're idiots. And bad people.
1 comment:
I recall going through the exact same situation during the year I lived in Nashville. The city got a dusting (not even an inch of snow because you could still see grass poking through) and the entire metro shut down. Cars were in ditches and there were wrecks everywhere. I couldn't believe that the schools shut down but, I suppose, the buses weren't about to fare any better on the roadways than the rest of the drivers.
My roommates and I were dead broke at the time but we found some old paneling and MacGyvered some sleds.
Post a Comment