Snow day? Hmm. Not really. Because I don’t punch a clock, I left just a wee bit earlier than usual. It’s okay, I’ll get at least 40 hours in this week one way or another. It snowed all day but I don’t think we are getting as much snow as was predicted. Nevertheless, I knew that leaving during my regular rush hour commute would be messy. It would probably take me twice as long to get home as usual. I think I was right. I wasn’t really worried about the driving. It wasn’t all that bad, at least on the Planet Ann Arbor surface streets. Slippery but even those fearless SUV drivers were driving at a conservative speed and keeping a safe distance. This is February and even though we haven’t had a whole heckuva lot of snow this year, people have learned.

We are not paralyzed by snow here like so many of you on the eastern seaboard are. We’re getting a sniggly little bit of a snowstorm here. We can pretty much deal with it. The freeways are dangerous. I heard random news reports that there were big trucks jack-knifed in many locations, three of them in the Climax area of I94, near Kalamazoo. I do not take the freeway for my little commute when it is snowing or even sometimes when it’s raining really hard. It’s a busy stretch of road with lots of huge trucks and some awful WWII-style cloverleaf exchanges. Dangerous from the get-go and a big backup could keep me sitting there for hours. For an eight-mile commute.

I have always thought that non-essential employees should not have to report to their physical place of work on snow days. By “non-essential”, I mean those who do not have to be on site dealing with actual people or pieces of equipment. I am a non-essential employee in my current job. The work I do sits waaaayyy back from any of our actual customers. That doesn’t mean that I’m not important. If I do my job well, our essential employees will not be called upon to answer questions and/or fix things.

The thing is that so many of us can work from home. Telecommute. I rarely do that but I can if I want or need to. I always thought that I would want to telecommute. And heck, when I was a theatre guild administrator (or whatever I was), I did work from home. Now? I actually enjoy going in and hanging out in my cube. Go figger. But. When the weather is bad, I still think that those of us who do not need to be on the roads, at least during rush hour, should not be there. Having extra people on the road just snarls things up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.