pseydtonne | Wherein I prove I am a lunatic

I drove to work today.

Normally this takes 30 minutes door to door (19 miles), but today it took 90 minutes. I've never spent so long in first gear on an expressway.

I checked the traffic before I left and saw that route 9 west and route 128 north were both moving at 12 MPH. That seemed unlikely at 11 in the morning, but it turned out to be true. When we started going 25 around Totten Pond Road, I cheered.

I have several reasons that I didn't want to telecommute, even though I suspected everyone else at my office would:
1) I'm low on food at my house, so I'd have to go to the supermarket during the day;
2) If I left, my landlord's son would attack the driveway with his snow blower more effectively;
3) I suspect I'll be trapped at home tomorrow as well. This has been confirmed since my boss sent email ordering us to work from home so they can plow the lots around the complex;
4) I don't like working from home -- I get cabin fever very quickly;
5) My desk phone isn't forwarding to any of my numbers. A guy in Houston has called in help from the phone provider. However they still haven't solved the problem after four business days of research. I wish them the best of luck, because it sounds like a wacky case;
6) I like my new desk at work. It gets a ton of sunlight.

If you're not living in a big city and wondering why people are complaining so much about the snow in big cities, allow me to explain.

It snowed a lot worse in my hometown. However upstate New Yorkers have front lawns for snow piling. Thus you never really run out of places to put the stuff (though we came close one year). Also many places don't allow overnight parking, so the streets can be plowed more easily.

In Boston, there has been the expectation that a big snow will always be followed by a thaw. It may only get up to 40 or 45F, but that's enough to melt the big stuff before the next storm. That hasn't happened this time: it snows, then it snows again, and again, and it doesn't melt. It's been colder than usual as well.

Add to this that space is maximized already. There aren't open spaces for dumping anything. There is an ocean, but pollution problems have meant that we can't dump the stuff there. The city of Lawrence (their motto: Bienvenidos a la valle Merrimaque) got in trouble for dumping snow into the Merrimack River because it's potable water.

Remember that the snow that gets plowed isn't simply snow, even when it just fell. It fell on sand and salt, crud from the street, cigarette butts, weird oil and the occasional crackhead. Merely dumping this in the ocean kills ocean critters (most of whom quit smoking). Thus the option is to plow less and leave wider gaps between the curb and the drivable road.

As of Thursday we had 60.3 inches of snow this winter. That's five feet or one and a half meters of snow, more than a typical accumulation for an entire season in Boston. Since nothing has melted and we expect another 15 inches by the end of tomorrow, we're looking at snow banks taller than adults.

The answer is clear: we hijack a county or two in northern Maine. We'll bring booze (to pay them) and dump all the snow. This will tie up I-95 and whatever local roads are needed, but it'll be worth it.

Oh, and I should get back to work.