You said, "It's snowing, it's snowing - God I hate this weather!"

Today, my wife and I did something crazy in the grand scheme of things: we both went to work in the morning. Ordinarily, this isn't such a big deal, what with the whole need to make a living and have something to do with our time. Today, however, we had to drive through several inches of snow being tossed around by 30 mile-per-hour winds, and I really should note that Champaign and Urbana both do a terrible job of plowing city streets. Taking a quick look around local blogs, I'm not the first to complain. The problem seems to be either that the plows don't operate during the night during a snowstorm, which is kind of critical for getting roads clear by morning, or more likely that there just aren't enough plows. Apparently, the city makes it a priority to plow out the bus routes, which is very good, but they might want to consider adding major streets to the list as well. After my wife's workplace closed up shop at 10:00 am, two hours too late to make much of a difference, and mine announced classes were cancelled at 8:45am, an hour too late to make much of a difference for the faculty and more responsible students, I still could barely get home. Not to say the mall where she works is sad, but they didn't even bother to plow out their access road. They do have a plow, but he seemed content to move snow around the parking lot, even though no one was parked there.

Still, these are details. The big problem, and I think it is a big problem, is that we both felt the need to go to work in the first place. Driving in a blizzard on roads covered in a few inches of snow and occasional near-whiteouts is a really unsafe thing, and I'm sure in the long run that the productivity gained by the small fraction of people who actually make it to work before being sent home shortly thereafter is more than cancelled out by the lost productivity to all the people who get stuck halfway there, tying up emergency vehicles that would otherwise be busy taking care of the people who crashed their cars into other cars when the other cars swerved suddenly to avoid the cars stuck halfway there. We would all be better off if, as a society, if we could wrap our minds around the fact that sometimes it's a good idea to give everyone a day off because God himself (or whatever deity/deities/spiritual metaphors in which you dis/believe [note the cool ALA type "slash" construction!!!]) really doesn't want us to get there. My job is important, as is my wife's, but how much should we really risk our health and safety when we can work nearly as effectively from home? It's really not rational, but that rat race mentality does pervade American culture, and it's time for us all to chill out a bit. I'd say that this is obvious, but consider the limited number of vacation days that many jobs grant their employees, some of whom may have children whose own needs will call upon many of those vacation days, and you start to see a real problem with our corporatized culture. It's a job, in the end, not our main reason for living. Call me unpatriotic, but I think the Europeans have a healthier attitude toward the whole work/personal life balance, and they still manage to give everyone universal healthcare too. Perhaps we should start taking notes. Maybe we can start on a day where we don't go into work because the weather has made the roads impassable (according to the forecast, we have blizzard conditions again tomorrow, and the wife just got a call saying she can stay home)...