A big ol’ storm has paralyzed the midwest, and Memphis isn’t doing so well, either. When I crawled under a house yesterday morning, everything was fine. When I emerged some hours later, the city was covered with sleet, with more coming down all the time. By the time I set out for home (a fifteen-minute drive under ordinary conditions), it was dark and just at the time when rush hour is worst. It took an hour and a half to get home. Nobody was driving over 20 mph, and most of the time, when we were moving at all, we were going about 5 mph. All of the streets were packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic, as the Interstates were impassible.
Thus it is in the South. We don’t know how to drive in ice and snow, and it just doesn’t pay to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars preparing for a storm that might occur once every three or four years. We have no snowplows, very little salt and sand, and apparently a governmental workforce that isn’t too enthusiastic about getting overtime hours.
Today the roads were iced over. You could drive 40 mph, but you couldn’t stop! So folks were still creeping along like a snail on his way to see his mother-in-law. Combine that with a backlog of plumbing jobs I had to get to and you can imagine why I see little attraction in the song “It’s the *most* wonderful tiiime of the year.”
Ah, remember the halcyon days of working for a plumbing company. I put in for my vacation months in advance; I broke it up so that the days would adjoin my regular days off. I’d put another log on the fire, put my feet up, and let the Company fend for themselves. Christmas was a great time.
Now I can no longer tell the Company to go jump in the lake. I am the company. So I fight the single-digit weather and the icy streets, solving one problem after another, because folks rely on me and turning them down would be the equivalent of throwing them to the wolves.
But it’s still too doggone cold.
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