Today was a disaster in the NYC metro area, albeit one that I, uncharacteristically sat out. It was the first ‘wintry mix’ to hit the area this season, and it caught the authorities unprepared. Luckily, I had the day off, so after hitting the supermarket around noon to buy some pasta (my go-to meal for cold, stormy days is a big pot of pasta), I hunkered down in my apartment and listened to the litany of woes on the radio. In all, about three to five inches of snow fell.
Hundreds of Jersey-bound bus commuters were stranded in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, necessitating a shutdown of the facility. The roads were littered with accidents. Then I got the phone calls- the guy who was supposed to start work at five was stuck in a parking lot two miles north of work- the road was impassible with a forty car pile-up. A contractor called, he had gone a quarter mile in an hour and wanted to turn around and spend the night camping out on our floor. My phone kept ringing and pinging- calls and texts... and here I was in beautiful Yonkers, cooking up a mess of pasta, with no plans to leave the house.
My people got to where they needed to be, if not where they wanted to be. It was a minor storm by meteorological standards, but the timing was terrible. It hit around rush hour, and the roads hadn’t been pre-treated with the spray of brine they would have gotten in actual winter. It also seems as if everyone forgets how to drive in the snow between March and November. Tomorrow, it’s supposed to be a sunny day in the mid-forties, so I should have no problem getting to work, but I have a lot of empathy for everyone who was caught in today’s shitstorm, masquerading as a snowstorm.
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