Snow Schmo
so the uk has a bit of a snowfall! well you don’t say! get a grip saps it is the beginning of february! what the hell do you expect, forest fires?
a crappy little snowfall and the country goes to hell. what’s that about then?
oh i’ll tell you what it’s about, and it’s not as simple as it seems.
first off, too many people are bone idle, and that includes too many school teachers and the like. any excuse for a day off. in this case the excuse seems to have been health and safety, a favorite refuge of the idle jobsworth. it’s ideal since it allows them to take the day off work under cover of concern for the safety of pupils, their own responsibility for the safety of pupils, or both (to be sure, to be sure).
when i was a kid you went to school because it was a monday or a friday or any of the days in between, not if you felt like it. and 4×4′s were owned by the army, not your mother! hell we never had a car at all and like almost every other kid i had to travel/walk miles to school by myself come rain or shine, or snow or blizzard for that matter.
and you know what, whether we liked it or not, mostly not, there’d be a full complement of teaching staff there to get on with the a near-normal day. (incidentally, any such day would likely entail a bit arithmetic without the aid of a calculator — shock/horror — but i digress).
the truth is that apart from routine incompetence on the part of many who need to respond, i sense the hand of bean-counters here. these are the creatures whose lives are occupied with matters such as probability: the estimated frequency of what are now commonly referred to in the media as “weather events”.
the judgement being that the less frequent any such “event” is expected to be, the less expenditure is allocated to deal with it when it occurs. add to that the unfamiliarity of public to these modestly-challenging conditions, along with the appetite of rolling news media for a headline, however exaggerated and everything grinds to a halt. pathetic!
at least, when we do have snow it only lasts about a day; or in this case, where i live, about five minutes! what a disappointment. i was looking forward to getting my sledge out.
i think i might sue! 