A snow day by any other name...

A snow day! I hadn’t imagined, when I took this new job, that I’d get a snow day. I’m thrilled. Yesterday, with blizzard-terror instilled in us all, I packed my backpack in a manner of which Brown Pop would be proud. We’d been told to come prepared to stay overnight, in case conditions got worse more quickly than predicted, and in case we needed to babysit hundreds of stranded passengers until flights were moving again. Thanks to the logic of the company, and the fact that they really do seem to put our safety as a top priority, the decision came from France: cancel all except the first flight out on Monday and all flights on Tuesday. Get the bulk of the employees home safely before public transportation shuts down.

And shut down it did. Most of us started our trek home around 5pm. I usually take a bus and then air train to work; I heard that the air train shut down about 7pm last night and the buses started shutting down around 9pm. By 11pm, the subway and trains shut down, and a curfew was put in place for all except emergency vehicles and snowplows. The mayor made sure to emphasize that food delivery bikes were not considered emergency vehicles in case some were unsure. (Although there’s now a conspiracy theory flying around about the Governor secretly keeping the subways running even though he told the city they were shutting down…pretty tricky of him, eh? For what reason? Who can figure...) The city is pretty creative when it comes to plows, by the way; with eight million people, you can imagine just how many garbage trucks this city uses. Many of those same garbage trucks become snowplows when the white stuff starts to fall. I'm impressed.

So now here we are cozied up in our tiny space, while the snow continues to fall, all warm and toasty; grateful for this life I now live. The blizzard fizzled out in our area leaving only 11-20 inches; that’s barely enough to cancel school up here! I’m sure they’ll joke about the little blizzard that wasn’t for weeks, but for now, I’ll soak up every second of my snow day and have another cup of coffee.