Don Kowalewski
Writer. Ad Sales and Marketing. Social Media Content Creator. Aeropress Coffee. Makes the best salsa in the world.
Let’s Play Snow-Day or No-Snow-Day!
It’s time for everyone’s favorite new game show (queue snappy 70s disco music) …
Snow-Day or No-Snow-Day!!!
You all know how to play, but for those playing at home, here are the rules…
First, you start to get texts from friends and co-Teachers (I’m married to a teacher, and teachers take this Snow-Day shit way more serious than kids) saying, “have you seen the weather.” Then, you open your Weather.com App and compare it to the Accuweather App, and then you keep texting back-and-forth to make sure what you’re seeing on your App is what everyone else is seeing. You start to check the local TV station websites for up to the minute school-closing lists and for some weatherman to tell you what you already saw on your weather App.
I do none of this because I have a job where they don’t give us snow-days and I take a little delight in telling my entire family that I don’t think they’ll have a snow day. I’m a jerk.
Then, if you’re not bitter and not me, you start hoping for that phone to ring and the automated voice to tell you, “due to inclement weather, School-You-Go-To is closed,” and you wait …and wait, and wait.
Side note …I mean, it’s great that schools can robocall their entire staff and student body, but when a Principal can, essentially, play God and cancel school, he or she should really have some fun with it. I think the Principal should first make a fake-call and say something like, “hi, this is your Principal, and the weather looks grim so, for tomorrow, School-You-Go-To might be closed. Stay close to your phone and put those pajamas on backward. And now, here’s my favorite passage from Old Man and the Sea … everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”
Add a little flare, right?
That robocall-thing is a cool modern aspect of the Snow-Day or No-Snow-Day game show. In my day, we didn’t get phone calls. We listened to the News radio station and watched TV. The only time the phone rang was when another Mom would hear from a teacher who heard from the neighbor of the Superintendent that school was officially canceled.
Another modern snow-day tracking thing is the Snow Day Calculator App which allows you to enter your zip code, school, city, and the level at which you believe in a higher power, and the App will spit out the mathematical likelihood that you’ll have a Snow-Day. At the time I write this Blog, there’re 7-inches of snow on the ground in suburban Detroit and another 2 inches will fall by midnight, and Snow Day Calculator says there’s an 80% chance my kids (and wife) will not have school.
Oh, and your school will always be the last one cancelled and as you see schools and districts around you canceling school and you’re still open, you’ll badmouth that school and those people in that city as being soft and weak until your school gets canceled and only then will you concede the storm is actually bad enough that it could jeopardize safety …before that moment, everyone else was overly precautious.
When school is finally canceled, there is joy, dancing, screaming, and drinking (hot cocoa for my kids, wine for my wife). Even though everyone knows all at once, all at the same time, and every phone in our house, including the landline we forgot we had, all ring to robocall the good news, every kid and teacher-wife need to text all their friends and co-teachers to confirm it’s really, really true.
And then everyone immediately begins tracking the likelihood that the next day will be canceled, too.
Oh, another part of this is old-guys like me, and often grandparents and people without kids, will all reminisce about how kids-these-days are snowflakes and wimpy and, “in my day they never canceled school,” and maybe that’s true, but don’t all old-people and parents want a better life for their children and grandchildren than they had? Well, more snow-days for lesser-reasons is that better-life you wished for.
Stop complaining. Build a snowman. Go see a movie. Because you’re the next contestant on . . .
Snow-Day or No-Snow-Day!
Stay tuned tomorrow for how I didn’t rake or bag a single leaf this fall.
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Don Kowalewski 