Snow Driving

It's snow driving season again, here in Nebraska, when countless drivers wrap their hubris around various stationary objects. It's a time honored tradition of sudden rememberance (usually while sliding sideways through a controlled intersection) of what it is to be a responsible driver in adverse conditions. Nebraskans, for the most part, are excellent at snow driving; it's the snow stopping that really puts them in the ditch. After so many season and so many ditches, you think we would have learned -- and that's the problem, we have -- and this year we have it all figured out: It's those other fuckers who can't drive in the snow.

No joke -- ask any Nebraskan what the greatest threat on the snowy road is, and they will tell you it's all those crazy people out there driving like idiots. No one says 'black ice' or 'white-out conditions caused by blowing snow' because as a Nabraskan, you are raised to deftly navigate these treacherous conditions, and these idiots keep fucking it up for the rest of us. Some of these people have to be the aforementioned idiots, statistically speaking. They can't all be from Iowa.

This morning I woke up to the news report that every main traffic artery in the city was littered with collisions. The interstate was a mess. On south 84th street, an SUV collided with a snow plow. A SNOW PLOW? What flagrant act of self-confidence precipitated that judgement call? I don't know about my fellow Nebraskans, but when I see a snow plow, a heavy duty dump truck loaded with a few metric tons of salt-sand casting a wave of snow and road debris off its blade, I keep a reasonable following distance. The very fact that the plow and the SUV came close enough for mishap is indication that someone or something went horribly wrong. I'm guessing that it wasn't the snow plow driver, but I could be wrong.

Why, America, must we wage war on the SUV and it's symboitic parasite, the SUV driver? Why do we (that is, I) feel the need to judge these people, some of whom may actually have a legitimate reason to own such a ridiculously large and inefficient vehicle? I mean, I have my Explorer because I need it to haul my skis to Colorado once a year, but these other idiots . . .

The problem with the Nebraskan mind is that it is acutely aware that things could be worse, and when they get worse, the Nebraskan will drive accordingly. But this -- that little dusting of white stuff out there? -- this is nothing. Maybe increase following distance a micron, but this is nothing.

Nebraskans revel in the horror of winters past. In 2000 we got about six feet of snow and the temperature never broke freezing for three months. The snow piled up high and deep and parking lots devoted half their space to these mountains of ice that grew larger with each successive snow. It seemed as though G-d had forsaken the great state of Nebraska. I was new to the state at the time and all anyone could talk about was the October ice storm of 1997; that was bad -- this, this is nothing. That October, an ice storm glazed the entire city and, since the leaves on the trees had not yet fallen, tree limbs under the ice's weight began snapping. Major power outages and street obstruction followed. Chaos reigned. Streets were literal ice sheets. And some of these idiots out there on the roads? You'd think they'd never driven on a sheet of black ice before. You need to turn into the skid -- into the skid.

The fact of snow driving is that there are times when we need to just pack it in, put on a pot of coffee and say, fuck it -- I'm not going out in that. But we can't do that can we? I remember I was working in a call center a couple winters ago. To get to the center, I had to take the interstate. During a bad snow storm, I made it a few blocks and decided that my life was not worth the $8 an hour. I turned home and called the absentee line. The next shift I was given a writen verbal warning (Note: if you write it down and make me sign something -- it's not verbal) about my attendance. You see, this company had an odd policy -- sometimes they would understand that the weather was so terrible that no one should be at work and they would forgive an absence. Other times they would not. And there was no way to know when you could "safely" blow off work without incurring an attendance infraction. No one knew how the decision was made or if there were any metric to the decision process. No one really knew who made the decision. Working there was a little Oz-like, but the little guy behind the curtain never made it in to my area. Anyway -- I told my supervisor that I was sorry that I could not make it, but the roads were terrible and I wanted to live to see my thirtieth birthday. He said, be that as it may, we have customers in all fifty states, and we need to be here to take their calls. The ordering of cheap plastic crap from points east was the most important thing I could be doing. Retired school teachers in Florida didn't know, or presumably care, that we were in the midst of a leathal snow storm. That was the policy.

This job was a suppliment to my lucrative employment as a . . . my substantial . . . the . . . look, I needed a second job because design pays dick. But it was a second job; they had a pulse test to get hired. I didn't care if I got fired for preserving my safety. But there were people there who worked full time -- who needed the job. These people could be stuck in between the fear of driving to work and the fear of losing their only source of income. And as we all know, the business of business is the only business we know. If it's good for the owner-class, it's going to be good for everyone else -- eventually.

And where am I this morning after a four inch snow that has the city tied up in traffic accidents? I'm at work.