You folks in Chattanooga got some snow yesterday -- OUR SNOW!!! The storm that dumped that crash-causing whiteness didn't take its expected route yesterday and made Chattanooga look like the Phoenix had just taken a huge dump on the city. Well today it was Nashville's turn to get crapped on, and I unpleasantly woke up to a bitterly cold, ugly sight.
I'm going to use this snow-filled week as an opportunity to cover a few things about southern-society in relation to snow, because it really pisses me off.
The first thing I want to cover is the unquestionable relationship between the TV Weatherman and the grocery industry. It is without a doubt that companies like Wal-Mart, Kroger, Publix and Harris Teeter pay the news stations to report snow, when their sales start to slump.
You can almost imagine them all in a secret meeting in some private men's-only club, as everyone smokes fat Cuban cigars wearing $1,000 Italian suites, as they plan the next great snow-storm scare. I say this because up until 5:00 PM day-before-yesterday, every local weather agency in Nashville was reporting that snow would begin around 8:00 PM. I know that reporting weather is a pretty volatile thing, but a three-hour forecast shouldn't be that hard with all of man's technology.
I happened to be at work until 8:30 PM that night and I would periodically look out my window just for a glimpse of this white hell. I never saw anything. So I went home, did my usual routine, periodically peeking out the window, but never saw a thing. I woke up yesterday morning expecting the sun to be reflecting off a 2 inch layer of white hell, never to see a single flake.
All the while that evening, mind you, the grocery stores were packed with panic-filled morons who thought that two inches of snow meant that they wouldn't be able exit their homes for 18 months. So here you have a news company directly getting rich off the grocery stores bribe, and the grocery stores getting rich of the stupidity that our fine citizenry truly is.
Next, you have the southern-man's incompetence when it comes to driving, should there be a flake of snow falling from the great-gray sky. In stark contrast to the aforementioned report of snow, yesterday was a slow weather-based news day. No terrors in the night, no panic, no nothin'! But I awoke to a dreaded sight that my lovely home-towner's experienced yesterday. Ugh!
I took my time getting ready for work this morning, because I wanted to make sure I had enough time getting to work. I fully anticipate the way people drive in this kind of weather and knew that hurrying wasn't going to get me to work on time, so I took it easy. And boy, oh boy, was I right. See, this morning, city workers in mass waged their war on mother nature and laid salt on our streets. Lot's of salt. So much so that driving down the road sounded like I was driving down a gravel driveway going 80 miles per hour, because of all the salt that was getting kicked up into my wheel well.
But unlike our seasoned brothers and sisters in the North, people in the south don't know how to drive when it snows. You could simply compare this morning's road conditions to that of a slight afternoon drizzle, sans the sand. There was no ice on the roads, there was no snow on the roads, there was nothing about the morning commute which would require someone to LITERALLY drive 15 miles per hour on a designated 45 mile per hour road. But you know what? The idiots up here were driving that slow. One conspiring pessimist might conclude that people drive like this so they don't have to be at work on time. They can use the weather as an excuse to be late. I disagree. I think that people are just so stupid that they can't accurately judge the road conditions well enough to know that they're driving like complete and total douche bags.
The commute for me to get to work every morning is 4 miles long and takes me on average 15 minutes because I live and work on a main artery of Nashville. Add a light drizzle and it gets bumped up to 20 minutes. This morning, it took me 45 minutes to get to work, and there was honestly hardly any traffic on the roads. The people who were on the roads, however, thought that if their RPM gauge ever reached 3,000 RPM's, then they would go flying off the road in an uncontrollable spin, resulting in their unquestionable death. The roads this morning were perfectly adequate and driving the designated 45 miles per hour would have been perfectly safe. Thank you, southern culture, for making me late to work this morning.
To sum up, I hate snow. I find nothing about the snow to be fun and delightful. It makes me cold and wet, and late to work in the mornings. It makes people doubt their driving skills and makes them have stupid wrecks. If it never snows another day in my life, I will thank George W. Bush for personally causing global warming.