Weather day off

Yesterday my supervisor offered us the option of taking a personal day today because of the impending bad weather. A few hours later, her boss nixed it. Yesterday after I got home a "team leader" or whatever they're called, called me to say that we had a 10 AM start time today.

When I woke up this morning I called the automated line and learned that start time had been moved to 12 noon. A few minutes later, the team leader called me again to tell me about the 12 noon start time. So I asked him: if the highways are not supposed to start thawing at noon, how are we supposed to get there by noon? He didn't have an answer for that, except that he expected more instructions soon to clarify matters.

And we were still having a 3:15 PM end time. This means that we would have to stop in the field at about 2:45 in order to get back to the office and turn our stuff in and the team leaders to do their end-of-day stuff so they could punch out by 3:15 also. If we started at noon, that means we most likely wouldn't be actually reading meters until 12:30, which means we would have 2 hours and 15 minutes to do actual work. For the route that I expected to get today, that means I would have been able to do about 2/3 of it, or about 300 meters. And that's only if all went perfectly smooth. The cold weather and icy spots left in the shade would have made it slower work, I'm sure.

So then about 30 minutes later he called back yet again and said I could take a personal day if I wanted to. Yep, back to the original plan. So I took the day off.

We didn't get any snow at my house. We only got freezing rain. In fact I'm pretty sure that's all that anyone around here got. My wife had a treacherous time getting home last night around 10 PM because the roads were already icy by that time.

In other news, my dial-up account is still active and I'm using it today because the wireless has been out since yesterday afternoon, even though they are claiming "no outages." So I'm going to be canceling this service. I've been checking out other options and I think I'll use our local electric company's wireless service. I know someone who has it and has never had any problems with it. I was checking out his installation also, and they use small (10-element or so) yagis (high-gain directional antennas), so I think it will be good. They'll cost me about $10 per month more than this service, plus either $250 or $150 for the installation, depending on which package I get.

In still other news, I am almost out of my favorite pipe tobacco, but I'm going to wait for the income tax return before I order more. I still have plenty of back-up tobacco.