No, the question isn’t meant in a cosmic sense as in, “What is my place in the universe?” It means, “Why the hell was I asked to risk my life driving through a snow storm to get to work in order to provide tech support for an empty building?”
Because of this major storm, school was called off last night at around 6 PM. Unfortunately, though there are no teachers or children or administrators here today, “All support personnel must report.” Now, I can understand why maintenance has to be here. There are the boilers to keep an eye on and a massive amount of plowing and snow shoveling to do to make the place accessible for Monday.
But me? I am the technical support Help Desk. My job is to respond to tickets and phone calls asking for assistance. There is NO ONE HERE. Who is going to call me?!
My work was closed - tho the streets don’t look all that bad, and I have only a 6 minute commute. Lots of folk (including the public) come from far greater distances. Been a while since I’ve had a “snow day”!
Yeah, our schools are closed but the message said that “Support staff and twelve month staff” still had to be there. I assumed it had to do with union contracts or something, I dunno.
My job isn’t affiliated with the school in any way and I got a text message saying that nothing that couldn’t wait until Monday was worth landing in a ditch for today.
I’ve been in the same situation, but the reason for me to be there was because Accounting had to go in to run payroll. So IT needed to be there just in case they had a problem or needed toner.
What the administration doesn’t realize/care in situations like this, is that it’s really inconvenient for maintenance to plow around the cars of the office staff that was forced to go in and to have to hustle to clear snow from emergency exits for people that should’t be there.
At my last job, we had to staff for the day after Thanksgiving (database support). We constantly joked about bringing in a ping pong table or games to play, because if we were lucky (unlucky?), we’d get 1-2 calls all day. Instead, we pretty much sat around surfing the net and listening to music all day.
Better than my asshole “had a stroke and was forced to retire” boss, who worked from home every day but threatened to give us warnings if we didn’t show up when it snowed a foot, and countermanded a VP’s “everyone can go home at 2pm on Christmas Eve” email to make his team stay until 5pm.
I had to go in yesterday, but it was because I had to go get a test car and get it to another facility for prep and then get it back to my building. it actually wasn’t that bad; a hell of a lot of people stayed home so my drive in was rather peaceful; a slow and steady 35-40 on the interstate. likewise for the drive home.
OTOH, the downside to having a 4x4 vehicle with real, actual winter tires is you get pissed as all hell at everyone else who doesn’t
