It’s been snowing a lot in Washington this winter. I love snow—always have. My favorite way of earning pocket money as a teenager was shoveling snow. You’d get a day off from school and spend the morning walking around the neighborhood doing walks and driveways. Bone weary by afternoon, it was off to the record store for Bob Dylan’s latest—or Smokey Robinson, Aretha, the Stones, a rare Lightnin’ Hopkins. By evening entire albums could memorized, the guitar licks deconstructed.
But in Washington they don’t love snow—can’t deal with it. Just after taking office last year President Obama made his first serious gaffe by remarking with annoyance that his children’s school had been closed in response to a 4-inch snowfall.
When I first moved here from Brooklyn, I felt the same way. Now I think it’s funny. I always say that if Islamic fundamentalists really wanted to stop the American Devil in his tracks, they’d threaten to drop an inch of snow on Washington. Nobody would venture out to try to stop them. [Note to self: Edit out last wisecrack if you hope ever to get a tech-writing job that requires security clearance.]
During recent twin blizzards that dropped 40 inches on my neighborhood, I had a ball. The first night, after six hours of heavy snowfall, I walked around in the streets—empty except for 8 inches of fresh powder and the glow of street lamps—with my 6- and 8-year-old daughters, tasting snowflakes and shaking snow off feathered tree branches. Got up early the next morning and shoveled the walk. No sense digging out the cars since snow was still falling. The forecast said it would keep falling for the foreseeable future.
Of course there was no school for the kids, so there was sledding. Once the plows came through and piled up well-compacted levees along the curbs, we dug snow forts. By the end of the week my yard looked like a prairie-dog town. When we weren’t out in the snow, we made hot cocoa and crepes.
When the snow stopped falling I dug out the cars. I dug out the neighbors. My wife, who does PR, has clients in the neighborhood. She called them to volunteer our family to clear snow at their house. I didn’t mind. I was in my element.
But the problem at this stage of the game is that there’s no money in it. And I had just started a contract job with the Web Transition Team of a non-profit organization in which I was to help move some 30,000 pages of content from its current Web site to a redesigned one. Kind of dumb work—much like shoveling snow— but fairly well paid. Deadlines were looming. Once we got past the grunt work, they might be willing to talk about a staff job involving more substantive writing and editing—maybe even management.
I wanted to do well, help them meet their deadlines and prove my worth. But the office was closed because of the snow. When you’re a contractor, you don’t get paid when you don’t work. I was so new they hadn’t had a chance to set up remote computer access to the organization’s network and the production tools I needed to work from home.
At first I was kind of panicky. I was losing the chance to make some money. Worse, I was losing the chance to be part of the solution to the problem, the chance to impress.
I spent much of the first two days after the first storm trying to untie the Gordian knot of remote access—three pages of instructions in what might as well have been Mandarin: Check system requirements. The office runs on an XP OS; none of this may work if you’re on Vista. Go into the control panel. Change the security settings. Uninstall your security software. Download McAfee. Download the Host Checker. Set up a Terminal Session. Do the “Hokey Pokey” and turn yourself around. Be advised that some CMS functionality may be unavailable.
Eventually someone from the Help Desk must’ve snow-shoed into the office. A techie answered the phone and got me into the network. I got a couple of days’ work in before the second storm hit.
In anticipation and as a precaution, I shoveled 30 inches of snow from the first storm off of the flat porch roof that runs all across the front of my house. After the second storm there was another foot of snow to shovel from the sidewalks. The plowed-in cars needed to be extricated. Street parking became a real problem. If someone parked in a cleared-out, empty space in front of a house not his own, the neighbors reenacted scenes from Lord of the Flies.
My kids were at home for 11 days, all told, including seven snow days, two weekends and Presidents’ Day. They demanded service: more hot cocoa and crepes, chocolate-covered strawberries, supervision while sledding and help digging snow forts. They needed help continually— finding gloves, unsticking zippers. Chauffer service for their friends. Grilled cheese sandwiches. “Where’s the remote? Are there any dry socks?” (How is it that one of every pair goes off to live with Jesus? I believe it’s to find salvation and lost gloves.) When the piles of laundry grew as high as the snow drifts, I had to attend to them.
Too bad the snow was too dry to make snowmen. In my mind I designed snow sculptures of Goldilocks and the three bears for the front yard.
Not much Web Transition Team work got done for some time after the onset of the Washington Blizzards of 2010. What happened to my professional motivation, my northerner’s gritty determination to be productive even in the face of natural disaster? I guess I just decided that I’d rather shovel snow than you know what.
And How It May Have Undermined My Career”