Snow Din

There's a recurring theme in Seattle every winter. It is the ever-present threat of Snowpocalypse, a torrential downfall of powder that ices roads, strands people inside their homes, and shuts the city down like Madagascar on the first day of flu season.

Most people take the fear-mongering tongue-in-cheek, and the Snowpocalypse never really transpires. At most, it's an inch or two and the resulting panic is pretty much laughable.

When I woke up this morning, it was white outside.

At 9:30, I sent out my addition to the ever-growing list of e-mails from my team members, each of them saying "can't travel, working from home". I spent the entire rest of the day on the couch trying to remotely connect to corpnet and watching the skies. They alternated in 45-minute cycles between a few lonesome flakes falling and a downright pretty flurry of huge globs of snowflakes.

In total, about six inches fell over the course of nine hours. For a town that can't handle more than a half an inch of powder, this is like the End of Days.

The talking heads on the local news won't stop raving about it. KOMO 4 says "Snow tapered off Thursday evening across much of central Puget Sound after snarling the morning commute in the Seattle metro area with hundreds of spinouts, nightmarish traffic backups and stranded vehicles." KING 5 reports "Motorists who made it through this morning's icy commute are struggling to get home." There are minute-by-minute weather reports. There are videos of cars sliding out of control.

People in this burg are abandoning their cars and walking down major state routes.

Through all of this, I just quietly hoped that I could get some goddamn VPN access. When 50% of your company goes on vacation for the last two weeks of the year, the other 50% apparently all need to check their e-mail when the snow starts a-fallin'.

I'm pretty much panicked out at this point. I'm warm, well-provisioned, and later tonight I might just make my downtown burlesque show after all.