Ahhh, the good ole days when you were forced to go home cause school was closing. I made it to work just fine today because there was just some rain and sleet happening. But by noon, you couldn’t even see outside because it was snowing so hard. The cars in the parking lot were quickly buried. I left 2 and half hours early. It took an hour and a half to get home (just over 2 miles). And here’s what I got home to…
Thank Gaawd we don’t have water coolers at work. But there is one person everyone tries to avoid during their morning trips to the lunchroom for coffee or a breakfast snack. He’s always in there making oatmeal around that time. Lucky for me, I’ve usually come and gone from warming my hot tea, but I have walked in and been given sad puppy dog eyes from some poor spirit he’s cornered. “Help me,” they are saying on the inside.
He’s the guy that no one wants to talk to because they will never escape. If you don’t speak to him first, he usually brings up some oddball topic just so he can speak to you. Here’s an example of a conversation I had with him one Christmas. I was sitting in the lunchroom on my lunch break and balancing my checkbook when he approached me.
“You writing out your Christmas cards there?”
“Nope, just paying some bills.”
“You know they don’t even think Jesus was born on Christmas. Because of certain things mentioned in the Bible and things that were going on around that time concerning Joseph and Mary having to go back to their homeland and pay their taxes, they speculate Jesus was probably born in the springtime.”
Silence.
“I’m just paying my bills.”
He turns and walks away.
All this comes to mind because it’s snowing and sleeting here again today. It started at about 4am and the roads are a mess. Yes, we had 70 degree weather just two days ago! But when I walk into work, everyone will pop up from their cubicles and want to know what it’s doing outside, even after they’ve just asked the last person who came in before me ten minutes ago.
About every other phone call will also ask what the weather is like where I am. Then, they will feel the need to tell me it’s 80 degrees today in Hawaii where they are. Or they’ve got snow in Chicago too. The truth is I really don’t care. I hate talking about the weather. When did we, as humans, get so boring? Tell me what you watched on TV last night or something. Tell me about the book you are reading. I don’t want minute play-by-play of frozen water fragments from the sky. If I did, I’d have become a meteorologist.
Oh, and I have vacation in four days, so screw this weather! I don’t really care. Thanks to global warming, Spring will hopefully get here whenever it gets here. If you want to talk about weather, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about trips to the lake, and cheaper energy bills, and swimming trunks, and backyard barbecues. How bout that?!?
