Snow Days

For me as a kid in Montana, one of the highlights of winter was a snow day. It took a pretty impressive manifestation of winter fury to close down the schools of hardy Montanans, but when drifting snow made country roads impassible to the school buses, it wasn't really worthwhile to keep the schools open for the townies. They even have snow days in Las Cruces, NM, though calling "snow day" for two or three inches of the white stuff seems pretty comical to me. For school kids, though, and teachers, those lost days have to be made up.

One of the perks of being a government worker in Washington DC is the occasional day off for snow, inauguration, or other special event. The great Snowmaggedon event of 2010 has already gotten most Federal employees two and one half days off, and one can't be confident that the place will open up Wednesday either. Most employers can't afford to be so generous, though, so the days off for the Feds provoke considerable resentment. The rationale for giving the nonessential government workers the day off is that in a one industry town, having all of them scrambling to get to work through impassible streets with the Metro only partially functional would keep anybody from getting anywhere safely.

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