A WORKING SNOW DAY IN STATE COLLEGE, PA

I woke up running for my life down Beaver Ave. I didn’t know who I was or who was chasing me. A bullet winged my earlobe and then. Oh wait, this isn’t a suspense short story.
He loved the lilt of her laugh, but had misgivings about her bobbing Adam’s apple that went along with it. Opps, this isn’t a Romance with a Twist story.
Let’s begin again, eh? A permanent rainbow was arcing over State College. It’d been there almost a week. AccuWeather was sending a team of meteorologists downtown to study it. Oh boy, this is not a One Fine Day in Happy Valley story either.
Excuse me again. This is your all-knowing narrator. The hopeful author has just informed me that this is a so-called comedy short story. So a priest, a rabbi and a parrot walk into a bar….
OK, OK, Bill I’ll begin anew. It was Valentine’s Day and a huge blizzard was blasting towards Centre County. Mt. Nittany was shrouded in an icy mist in the shape of Jo Pa. The Nittany Lion statue on campus had grown a second coat in anticipation. It was 8:30 a.m. and a brick office building in downtown State College started filling up with glum employees, slumped over trying to cuddle with themselves to keep warm. Breaths frozen outside turned to drool inside.
The office manager, Brad, walked in first. He was a 6’5” and with his badly slumping shoulders and downcast head looked like a question mark. In fact, he had more questions than answers, but had to pretend he knew it all.
Janice from clerical entered next and Brad nodded hello and headed for his first cup of coffee in the lunch room, even before taking off his coat. If he could, he would have hooked up a coffee IV drip straight into his arm. But alas, Star Bucks had not developed that technology yet.
Soon the full complement of 10 had arrived, hanging their coats up like a second skin to shed and put on as needed.
Brad only came alive with his second cuppa as he walked around the small office taking attendance. Brad told Jenny how pretty she looked, which caused Linda to leap up and shout “Crossing the line! Crossing the line, boss!” This was based on some sexual harassment training they’d just had that nixed almost all personal comments to co-workers, leaving only grunts of appreciation.
To cover his tracks, Brad told Jeremy how pretty he looked too, so as not to appear sexist. Linda sat down in a huff, which covered her like a shroud, but she was excitable as an exclamation point and was coiled ready to pop up immediately whenever offended again.
Tim, a short squat bull dog of a man, who at 25 looked 40, was the first to ask Brad, “Any chance of us getting off early due to the storm, Brad?”
Brad assured Tim that he’d keep on top of it.
This stirred up the staff to start staring out the small slit windows searching for the first flake to fall, hoping for an early release. This was not unlike prisoners getting out of jail for good behavior.
They started quoting the AccuWeather forecast of 10 to15 inches by tonight, gusts up to 50 miles per hour with blizzard white-out conditions predicted. And a freezing night without power was possible if the power lines fell like dropped watermelons during a David Letterman TV stunt, from his theater’s roof.
A steady stream of staff trooped into Brad’s office to ask if he’d heard anything from the home office about getting out early. He said he was checking his computer constantly to catch any updates on office closings. He thought they were like school kids pestering Mom and Dad constantly about school closing the next day. He didn’t feel particularly paternal, as several were older than him and all were adults.
Brad called a quick staff meeting in the board room. They sat there talking and laughing at this unexpected break from work. At the podium he told them that the home office was again warning them against sending any e-mails that could offend someone that would get them suspended or even fired.
John shouted out “How ‘bout the e-mails telling us to do more with less. They certainly offend me.” People hooted and hollered in agreement.
“John, quite sending out all those jokes. This isn’t ‘The Last Comic Standing’ show here. It’s an office. OK?” Brad shot back. “Your e-mail is really their e-mail to be pulled up any time they need to. If they wanted to cut half the staff, all they’d have to do is print out your inappropriate e-mails, fire you, then you’d all be applying to greet shoppers at 3 a.m. at Wal-Mart so fast your head would spin like Linda Blair’s in ‘The Exorcist’.”
“Can you show us how that’d look, Brad?” joked John.
Brad suddenly remembered why he seldom held staff meetings. On the rare occasion they were actually listening to what he said, they’d just make wise cracks about it.
“And only work related internet use. Buying and selling baskets on eBay isn’t part of your job description, Polly. Now get back to what you laughingly call work”
Brad returned to his office, leaving them talking and catching up on what everybody had done in the last 15 hours, since they’d left work. Apparently, their lives were very eventful because they stayed awhile.
As soon as everyone had gotten back to work, the lights flickered and the computer screens went shut eyes black. A general hub bub erupted with exclamations of outrage and joy. Once the system went down it was virtually impossible to do anything. Your computer just became a paperweight to see your own reflection in. Cyber space creates a black hole when it orbits elsewhere.
Jenny walked into Brad’s office and plopped down in a chair. She was young, perky and full of promise, a willowy 25 year-old, who saw the glass as full when it was actually empty. Brad hated perky, but appreciated willowy.
Jenny became wiggly as a puppy at the mention of snow and wanted to share her thoughts with Brad.
“Don’t you just love a snow storm, Brad? That sheet of quiet white lying on God’s great canvas. It’s like spiritual. For sure.”
Brad responded less than enthusiastically “I absolutely hate winter. I have since I started to work. It was great when I was a kid. Now I have to drive to work when school snow days are called and snake down the treacherous roads and streets hoping to get home alive, when all I want to do is stay home.”
“But that first flush of freshly fallen snow is so serene and clean. Everything just slows down and that fast paced life you lead takes a breather.” Jenny glowed.
“Sure, unless you try to stop at a red light or a stop sign, then you just glide your way into incoming traffic that can’t stop either. On the third day the snow’s turned to gray icy snot that doesn’t go away till spring. Then it turns black, like everyone’s mood at the end of a long hard winter.”
“But you can go sledding and ice skating with your kids” Jenny rambled on.
“What, and tear them away from their iPods, Wiis, Play Stations, cell phones and the internet? They’re more plugged in than a power plant.”
“Oh, you’re just an old grump, Bradly.” Jenny growled.
“Hey, wait a second didn’t your car get wrecked or something last winter in all that wonderful white snow?” Brad suddenly remembered.
“Yeah. So?” snapped Jenny as she stormed out.
The smokers snuck outside to light up. The snow was falling hard, but landing lightly. They cupped each lighter like it was the Olympic torch to set their butts on fire and get that blast of nicotine deep into their lungs. They soon looked like Frosty the Snowmen on fire. They hadn’t been able to smoke in the office since it’d been banned on September 11th, their own personal 9/11 tragedy. They were edgy and jumpy, till they could get out into the frosty flakey air and start puffing furiously.
Like airport runway lights shutting down, State College clicked off for the day. There was nary a pizza shop or a bar left to lift the soul. Closings on the radio came faster than rabbits running across a road, but Brad’s office still hadn’t heard anything.
People monitored the radio like a jealous girlfriend watching her cheating boyfriend and they called their friends and families complaining that they were still at work.
Jenny sat there soberly remembering how a snow plow had smashed into her car on Route 26 as she sat there taking a scenic shot of a snow covered possum last year. Her date for Valentine’s Day had just cancelled due to the storm. They’d only had two dates before and she was afraid the momentum would stop, as he hadn’t mentioned a make up date. She hated winter!
It was 4:10, about the time the winter sun wisely gave up and went somewhere else to get warm. Joe ran into Brad’s office shouting that Seven Mountains was closing. Brad had several workers that needed to go over the mountain to get home. He tried one more time to reach the home office where everyone had probably gone due to the storm.
He waited ten minutes and then made an executive decision. He announced that he was closing the office. There was a rush to the back door with people yanking on their coats, while calling home on their cell phones. Thus proving they could multi-task, when so motivated.
Most had left their brushes inside their cars, so when they opened a door to get them to brush the snow off, a wall of white fell on a car seat to soak it. And they did this for every snowstorm. The learning curve must be very steep for this.
By the time Brad left the office he was alone in the parking lot. He got into his car, turned the key and heard a plop, plop, plop hitting it. He looked around and saw a gang of kids pelting him with snowballs.
At first he swore at them. Then he popped it into gear and took off after them. They scattered like crows at a hand clap. He started to laugh. Then he drove in circles around the lot, slipping and sliding like a lunatic. He twirled. He swirled. He stomped on the gas and spun out of control in circles, till he was dizzy and giddy as a school girl with a five o’clock shadow.
He burst into a big smile remembering his gleeful boyhood days. Breathlessly he called his wife on his cell phone to tell her he was coming home and that this weekend they should all go tubing on Tussey Mountain. They’d just grab the kids, unplug them and go. And maybe he could learn to ski. He’d always wanted to. He loved winter!
The moral of this slight tale is don’t get old, and if you can’t stop the aging process, keep the embers simmering on your inner child, because that flame can be lit in an instant. And don’t wear white after Labor Day because in a blizzard you could become invisible and get run over by a snow plow.