Weapon of Mass Stupidity

The appearance of a white powdery substance throws this city into a raving panic. And no, I'm not talking about an envelope full of anthrax.

Whenever it snows, people here turn stoopid-- that's even stupider than just plain "stupid", just so you know. Wednesday morning, it started to snow during morning rush hour. Now, we're not talking about heavy lake-effect style snow. We're talking about flurries. Slightly heavy flurries, but flurries nonetheless. It quite literally brought the city to a standstill. I got the bus not long after the snow started and it must have been just in time. While my 15 minute commute turned into 35 minutes, there were several people who came in on the next bus and took more than an hour. I came skidding into class three or four minutes late, but it was okay because the professor wasn't there yet. And didn't show up at all. 30 minutes into the hour, the Dean Happy came in to let us know that class was cancelled. We were all like "Yeah, no duh. We're all only sitting here because we're plugged into the Ethernet connections. You didn't think we were still waiting for the professor, did you? Bwahhahahahahahaha!". Later that day, the professor sent us a letter to apologize for flaking out on us-- his commute in took two and a half hours. I can drive 2/3 of the way to The City of Light in that much time.

And it's not just that people can't drive in the snow. They also can't park. It's like they lose all ability to judge spatial relationships. How hard is it to park your car when you can still see the painted lines through the dusting of snow? I was ready to scream at the number of parking spaces that were unparkable because some moron pulled his SUV into a neighboring spot too crookedly and encroached on the second spot. In a city that has some of the fewest and most expensive parking spots per capita in this region of the country, this ought to be a criminal offense with some sort of horrible punishment attached.

The grand total snowfall for Wednesday came to a little more than 1/4 inch. 3-6 inches are forecast for this weekend. What will people do?? I'm going grocery shopping in a few minutes because I'm almost out of coffee and I don't want to deal with the crazies after work.