Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Stupid Weather People


So, last night I get all excited because the weather people are screeching, keening, pulling out their hair and promising all sorts of snowfall that will cause mass chaos and certain closing of schools and businesses. Its hard not to get swept up in the frenzy, because getting a closure has the same thrill no matter if you are 10 or 44.

I woke up this morning, tingling with excitement and look out my window to see.... absolutely NOTHING. Not a flake of snow to be seen anywhere. Nothing, nada, zilch. Work, of course, was open for business, but since the weather was predicted to become crappy, you could take leave without asking for it beforehand. Ok, this doesn’t help me any, since I’ve drained most of my vacation taking my spine injured dog to follow up appointments, or dealing with stupid legal things. I trudge into work (where more than half of my co-workers don’t show up), and the moment I get in the truck... it starts snowing.

Around noon its getting nasty and I say screw it and go home and stay home. It continues to get nasty and schools start closing and businesses start closing, and generally the state of Maryland comes to a grinding halt. So what about tomorrow?

How can it be 29 degrees (but it feels like 14) and we get freezing rain? Wasn’t there something in some long ago biology class that I didn’t pay that much attention to at the time that said when it gets to 32 or below, this thing called SNOW falls? Since when did freezing rain come into the its freezing and yet water still falls from the sky, freezing the moment it hits the ground to create the highway ice rink of doom? And why is it that we will be getting down to around 14 degrees (feels like 0) and yet we’ll be getting torrential downpours of freezing rain all the way up until its time to go to work... and then it’ll just be rain.

What this means to me is that at MOST work will give us a 2 hour delay for coming in. This means that not only will I be late coming in on the ice rink of doom, but so will everyone else. This also means that I’ll be working into work in sub-zero temperatures on the ice rink sidewalk to hell. Amazingly enough, around 3pm, the rain will once again turn into the cheerful sounding “wintry mix” (makes you think of that crappy “nut assortment” that gets tossed at you by cheap hosts), at which point they’ll “release” us so that a zillion people at the same time will be making a mad dash out of the parking lot skating rink of hades for the skating rink of certain death highway and to their probably lost power hours ago frozen pipes now a frozen swimming pool homes.

I’m so excited.

I’m also wondering why I can’t be as accurate in my work as meteorologists and still keep my job. There’s a 20% chance that the thing you needed me to finish by today will be done, with a chance of partly finished, and a 10 day forecast of me hiding in the coffee shop while you try to hunt me down. Yeah, save me a spot in the unemployment line.

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