We rarely get that much bad weather in my part of the UK but since we’re so unused to snow and generally unprepared, a little bit of it can cause absolute chaos. There is a policy for coming to work in bad weather which says we are supposed to make every reasonable effort to get here and that it’s up to management to decide if offices should close early in order to allow staff extra time to get home.
In the last serious snowpocalyse, I had very little difficulty getting to work on my commute that involves two buses, a train and some walking. People living within 5 minutes’ walk of campus didn’t bother coming in because it was too dangerous out there.
Yep, it’s part of life for 6 months of the year. If you stayed home every time the conditions were bad, civilization would shut down.
I grew up in Edmonton and had 0 (zero) snow days as a kid. “Snow days” were a foreign concept that applied to American kids on TV and in movies.
I’m in a warmer part of Canada now, but the situation isn’t much different at my work. Sometimes the office closes early so that we can beat the rush hour snarl. I’m a manager though, so I stay until my team is out. Means I’m usually leaving less than an hour before normal dismissal.
Yep. Living in an the Colorado mountains means you are prepared for ‘bad’ conditions. The county I live in has 3 major ski areas. Bad weather is part of the economy.
We have no real possibility of snow, but we have lots of levees. During flooding rains our department is supposed to come in to do levee watch, and possibly sandbagging.
I work for a federal organization that delivers things. You’re expected at work no matter what. That doesn’t mean everyone shows up, many call out sick, but all managers go to work.
This past winter, we had a big storm (for us in the south) and our district manager suspended service and sent a lot of people home. He was gone before the week was out, replaced. I have worked for this organization for 20 years and never heard of anyone suspending service, ever. He was a great guy, too. I still miss him.
Same for me. I grew up in a small town in southern Saskatchewan and I remember precisely one day when the school closed. It was a real blizzard that started overnight and was still going strong in the morning. It was dark and grey, with extremely reduced visibility within the town itself, high wind chill and hard snow.
Even so, Piper Dad made me get bundled up and drove me to the school, because he couldn’t believe they would close just because of a little blizzard.
When we arrived at the school, he couldn’t drive me to the main school door, because the intersection was blocked with drifting snow. We couldn’t see all of the school because the snow blocked visibility. The farther parts just faded off into the grey of the blizzard. Couldn’t see much of the houses farther down the side streets, either.
He made me get out and hike through the snowdrifts blocking the street and try the door. I still remember the hard pellets of snow hitting my face and the feeling of quickly approaching frostbite on my cheeks, even though I was bundled up with a toque and scarf. Plus the bootfulls of snow from wading through the snow banks.
School door was locked, of course, because none of the teachers had been able to make it to school.
I looked back and could barely make out our car. Fortunately he still had the headlights on to guide me back. Reported to Dad that the door was locked. He said something like “Huh. That’s new.” Then he drove me home.
So that was my one snow day in 12 years of school in small town Saskatchewan.
The explanation that circulated around playgrounds in Edmonton for why we didn’t get snow days, was because a kid in the 1960’s was in exactly your situation, but his Dad didn’t stick around to make sure the school was open. The kid tried all of the doors before slumping down in front of one and freezing to death.
Some casual Googling hasn’t turned up anything to corroborate this, but I’m not sure what to look for.
The fact that schools stayed open for student’s safety wasn’t a myth, but I’m not sure that it took a death to make it policy. I walked to school through all kinds of conditions. Trudging through a blizzard to school and finding it locked, I might have gotten half way home before I rested for a moment to huddle in that fluffy snowbank and never stood up.
Let people stay home? Nope. I work in the emergency department. If anything the opposite is true. They will sometimes require people to stay after their scheduled hours if the next shift is physically unable to get there. In fact that’s what happened this past weekend when we had a minor ice storm.
In Chicago, they expected you in no matter what. I was infamous for showing up no matter the weather, as I would just bundle up and walk; it didn’t matter if the trains and buses weren’t working, cars weren’t starting, and you couldn’t find a cab - I could cover the 3 miles in about 45 minutes. I think the worst was 15 or 20 below - I had one hell of a winter coat.
Here in KY, they close whenever there’s a travel advisory, which is typically any hint of snow, despite most everyone driving big honking trucks and SUVs.
Yes, I work in schools so if the district closes I don’t work. My husband doesn’t usually work from home, but if bad weather is forecast he can bring his computer home and work from here. His manager is very flexible about things like that.
I work at an ad agency in downtown Chicago; if the weather were bad enough (lots of snow, or extreme cold), they might close the office, but nearly everyone has laptops which they take home with them, and I work from home one or two days in a typical week, anyway…so it’d be no big deal to stay home if there were a blizzard, and there’d be no reason that I couldn’t work a full day anyway, unless the power went out.
In 27 years of working in Chicago (at five different companies over the years), I could probably count the number of days in which my office closed due to extreme weather on one hand.
I work mostly remotely, but we have in-person office hours once a week. Last week, my boss texted me and pointed out that the weather people were saying it was going to be -25F with wind chill, and suggested I do my work from home, in bed, under all the blankets and possibly some of my pets.
Every so often Boston decides the weather is too terrible for words, and the city effectively declares a snow/ice/hurricane day. It’s not that common, but when they shut the T down, that pretty much means nobody is going anywhere. I assume emergency services still has to get to work somehow, but a surprising number of other places just give up.
My first military assignment was in a 24 hour facility in the mid-west. Once in a while we’d get a snow storm so bad everything but the 24 hr facility, the gym and the cafeteria would close down. I got a call in the BOQ from someone off base who couldn’t get to work, so I bundled up and packed a back pack with all the food I had in my kitchenette. Every frozen dinner, every piece of fruit and a couple of cans of soup. I hiked my way to the facility through snow drifts and following the snowplow until it got stuck.
When I got to the facility I unloaded my backpack for the crew. That was the only food we had for 3 days when the cafeteria finally delivered leftover cold scrambled eggs. I was the additional duty disaster preparedness officer–people may have been hungry but they didn’t eat the nuclear survival kits I dragged out from storage.
As a matter of record, the nuclear survival kits had mostly stuff that tasted like graham crackers.
Store cashier here. Since we only get paid when we work, they are pretty flexible about it. In bad weather, they don’t need so many people as business is apt to be very slow. If they call me in at the last minute, they’ve reimbursed me my cab fare.
Previous boss responded to a question about working from home when 10-12 inches of snow was forecast as follows;
1> No, this is Minnesota, suck it up.
2> You can stay home if you feel this is a safety issue.
3> But if you do, I will refer you for disciplinary action.
And this from a bastard who worked from home every day. :mad:
Seriously, fuck that guy.
Now I work from home every day for a different manager at the same company.
My employer lets you stay home, but if you can’t work remotely, you have to take it as vacation or holiday :mad:. Seriously - one time we had a major enough blizzard that the localities (DC metro area) actually issued orders to avoid roads unless you were emergency responders. If you didn’t have vacation time to burn, you were out of luck.
Bear in mind, I’m in the DC metro area. If everyone tried to go to work during a blizzard, our already insane gridlock would be beyond nightmarish - witness reports of some afternoon-rush-hour snowfalls that have led to 3+ hour commutes, My husband foolishly let himself get stuck in one such - 9 miles = 3 hours home; he’d had warning but refused to leave because he had a conference call scheduled (which was of course cancelled!!). I got stuck in a surprise afternoon rush ice storm that caused me to take 2+ hours to get home once. And when there’s a full-on blizzard, even the Metro system shuts down sometimes.
We’re really on the cusp of northern enough to need major snow-clearing equipment, and southern enough to hardly need any. As a result, we have it, but not enough and people don’t have the winter tires / chains / etc. that someone from Minnesota or Boston would have, that would make it easier to cope.
Our schools tend to close at the drop of a hat. Partly that is because the county is served by a single district, and they won’t or can’t close just parts. So we might have rain, while western parts have dangerously icy roads, and everyone gets a day off. They also stay closed after the storm is over because there are no safe places for kids to wait for the buses or to walk to school due to mounded up piles from the plows.
AND they’ve closed because it’s cold. That boggles me a bit. I mean, are there really enough kids who don’t have warm coats and gloves? If you’re walking to school you’re generating heat. If you’re waiting for the bus you’re not but how long are the kids really outside? Egad. Growing up in Pennsylvania, I was wearing the Vatican-mandated fugly plaid jumper and knee socks and my legs were freezing because we couldn’t wear Satan-inspired pants to school, but our schools sure never closed just because it was in the teens outside.
With kids, it doesn’t matter if they have the gear - they won’t wear it. I’ve passed high school/middle school girls in subzero Chicago temps shivering in jeggings and a cute teeny jacket with no hat or gloves. If it’s going to be that cold all day, yeah, they close the schools to spare the little idiots.