A brutal winter storm brought the entire area to a standstill this week, hitting Sunday evening and dumping six inches of snow by morning. Yes, I know; you folks up north are laughing at the impact of only six inches, but we don’t have equipment or experience to deal with it. Worse, the cycles of freezing and refreezing quickly turned that six inches of friendly powder into a two-inch thick sheet of solid ice that covered everything.
For us, the power stayed on so we weren’t in any discomfort, and since Chelonia and I do our regular grocery shopping on Saturdays we had everything we needed to last a week. What that also meant was that we were still on the job.
We were able to keep the Fastrack, Inc. servers maintained from our home because we had the good fortune not to encounter problems that required hands-on attention. Only a few employees were able to physically travel in to the office, which does make me wonder if most of the usual crises we deal with are of the “between the monitor and the chair” variety. But I digress.
Our main challenge was keeping Cookie entertained. She’s very much a social creature and needs the stimulation of human contact (unlike her parents). We supervised her Facebook time, which was her connection to the outside world. She also stayed in touch with her grandmother who, after the storm ended Monday night, was able to commute to the office via helicopter.
The roads were thawed by Friday, and we were finally able to get out of the driveway. The ice, it seems, had the same effect on real life as a denial of service attack has on the company’s website.
Will your town may not have as many plows as we have you would still have some. If you see a road up here its not from the plows but from the cars using the roads. The hot engines of the cars & trucks help to melt the snow.
This happens on 1/31/2000
24 inches of snow could turn into 2 inches of ice.