Thoughts of LoWriter

Snow and Absolute Lateness

Why is it that when it snows in the Twin Cities, everybody drives like they're cavemen before the ice age seeing the first snowfall ever?

They're staring out their windows, peering at the sky with tilted heads, driving 40 on the freeway and screaming, "OH MY GOD! WHAT'S ALL THAT WHITE STUFF??? THE SKY IS FALLING; THE WORLD IS ENDING; AHHHHHH! I'd better drive 40. Maybe it won't catch me if I'm going more slowly than everybody else."

Also, I believe that MnDOT pays retired people to go out and get in the left lane next to someone going incredibly slowly in the right lane and match their speed exactly. These are the pace cars of the freeway. It's their job to make sure that when the caution flag is up, nobody goes faster than the minimum freeway speed limit.

All of this leads to people running into work just before The Point of Absolute Lateness.

Absolute Lateness is different than absolute zero in that it relates to time, not temps, but is similar in that things start to freeze at this point: Commerce, expressions on bosses' faces, your assets. Additionally, as with absolute zero, all movement (of cars, people, small children, cats) begins to slow to the point of stopping. It is the point at which you are so late that someone notices that you are gone.

While it is not the same as F-ing Late, which is when someone gets on the phone and wakes you out of a deep sleep to demand where the hell you are, it is the point at which someone gets irrate that you are not there. For stores and customer service people, it's one minute after the point at which the store opens, especially if they are the people who are supposed to open it. For teachers, it's one second after the second bell rings. For people working in cubicles, it's usually the moment your boss pulls into the parking lot, especially if you pull into the parking lot at that exact same moment. If you're working at a factory, it occurs after the whistle blows and one second after everyone else has filed into the factory. If you're working at Bethel, it's sometime around chapel at 10:00-ish. (Maybe. This is, of course, only an approximate estimation due mostly to the fact that only about 1/3 of the working popluation at Bethel actually works at all, so the odds of noticing that someone is not working decrease significantly as there are so many people who fall into the category "not working" in the first place. Due to this phenomenon, it may take up to several days for someone to notice that an employee is not there.)

It's called The Point of Absolute Lateness because up until that point, you're not really late. This is because start times at work are really only suggested start times. It's sort of like, "Hey, probably you should get here at 7:30. It might help you hate people less, and maybe you will be able to get something done before the customers start coming so that you don't waste the whole morning on your email." But if you don't, nobody is actually expecting you anyway.

This morning, as The Point of Absolute Lateness was fast approaching me while I sat behind the pace cars going a brisk 35 on the freeway in the less than very snowy morning on the not slippery at all actually road, I took a good look at the scenery and wondered what kind of horrible things I did in a past life to deserve all this bad karma.

Posted by LoWriter at February 24, 2005 08:31 AM