Window Watchers

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Today is one of those days that I miss working in the traditional office setting.

No, I’m not yearning for hour-long meetings overlapping each other and eating up an entire afternoon, countless interruptions trying to put the finishing touches on an article that isn’t nearly as good as it should be or nearly passing out from a fellow employees’ highly offensive perfume that someone suggested would be good to wear to work to clear the nasal passages of your cubicle inmates.

As great as those scenarios seem, and who doesn’t like the gentle waft of air from the microwave that just popped a bag of popcorn three floors down in the break room (I couldn’t resist one more), they pale in comparison to a day like today.

You see, today is a day like no other in the office setting.

Today is Watch the Weather Day across this great country of ours, or at least in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Well, they’re probably not really watching it in and around New York City since it’s already snowing pretty hard down there. Sorry, back to the subject.

Watch the Weather Day unfolds like most days, with people milling about and talking about germane subjects like sports, their kids, what they did over the weekend and of course, the weather. As the weather forecasters pick up the pace, weather dominates conversations and more importantly, the thoughts in everyone’s minds.

Pretty soon the threat of snow, ice or even thunderstorms if it’s the summer, dominates nearly everyone’s minds.

Distraction runs rampant.

People start gunning the Weather Channel. Surely the bandwidth decreases significantly when two-thirds of the staff clicks the button showing the live radar. Predications are made of said radar, estimates when the “heavy stuff” will start coming down.

People flock to the windows, if they don’t have one in their office. They look outside, trying to see where the danger is coming from.

People get phone calls from spouses, from children, from other family members. Even you though you only hear one side of the conversation – how could you miss it when it’s in the very next cubicle, or office or office pod – it’s pretty simple to guess what the subject is.

“Did they close school?”

“Be careful, I hear it’s getting bad.”

“The Weather Channel says it’s going to get worse by rush hour.”

“What do we need from the store?”

And then it comes, not on the phone to friends and family but direct conversations had with a straight face to supervisors, managers and bosses.

“I hear the roads are getting pretty bad, do you think the office will close early?”

And then the coup de grace, the best one of all.

“Do you think the office will be open tomorrow?”

Quite often the answer – at least in Kentucky – was yes and yes. Rarely was it yes and no, in fact never in my nearly 14 years there. The office did close for a few days when an ice storm completely debilitated the entire city, but it didn’t happen on a normal weekday, saving any panic that really wouldn’t have been that out of place.

The same definitely cannot be said for a situation like today, a Watch the Weather Day, when forecasters call for “the worst storm in 200 years,” a “powerhouse blizzard,” or the best one yet, a “blizzard of all blizzards” and widespread unproductivity and avoidance of work at the hands of the white stuff reign supreme.

 

P.S. Stay safe out there everybody, I hear it’s going to be quite a storm.