Snowmageddon is Upon Us…Maybe

If the fine folks in the weather prophecy business can be trusted, it is supposed to dump somewhere between one to two feet of snow on the greater Boston metro area in the next 24 hours or so.

Personally, I’m firmly in the “believe it when I see it” camp on this one.

This is largely a result of numerous—and I do mean NUMEROUS—instances in my 4+ years in Boston where the weather peeps, the town folk and pretty much everyone else spent days predicting our impending doom via snow/rain/hail/moths/locusts/etc. only to have absolutely nothing happen.

A little over a year ago, they put the entire city on lockdown and shut down just about everything that could possibly be shutdown in preparation for the Snowpocalypse that was to be the end of days.

Obviously, since I’m still here to bore you with my cynical Midwestern rhetoric, there was no calamity, no death and destruction. In the end, we nabbed roughly a quarter inch of snow and all was right with the world.

As such, the current parade of overblown hoopla—and trust me there is a metric butt-ton of hoopla—over the impending blizzard/nor’easter/snowstorm/whatevs is no surprise.

This is not the first—and most certainly won’t be the last—time that Boston flips out over weather that isn’t here and may or may not ever show up.

All signs point to this storm actually being quite a doozy and I’m down with that, mostly because I dig a good snowstorm. Granted, that is because I’m not responsible for scooping any snow and I don’t have to dig out a car. Also my “commute” to work is about ten minutes (max) on foot, so I won’t be inconvenienced in any way.

Unfortunately, even if the heavens do upon up and drop a couple feet of the white stuff, I don’t get a day off. That’s right, even if MIT shuts down for the day, the ever-diligent MIT Libraries will be open. That’s right, bitches. We stare adversity in the face and offer it a term loan on all textbooks that may prove useful over the entirety of the semester, we’re THAT bad-ass.

On the plus side, if the campus does close down, I’ll snag time and a half for dragging my ass in and checking out books to the two people who meandered over from their dorms in search of a book on kinetic energy or mechanics of rock excavation. Likely these two peeps will be from the Midwest and won’t even realize that it was snowing.

You see, in the Midwest we cancel classes when a building containing all of the teachers collapses. We shut down an entire university when the frozen gas lines cause a tragic explosion that claims thousands of lives. We shut down an entire city when…um…well, honestly I can’t imagine we’d ever do that in the Midwest. There’s work to be done, y’all.

Anyway, here’s hoping this storm does a little something to shut my mouth, because if it’s another dud, you can rest assured all of my New England-lovin’ friends will NEVER hear the end of it.