One Over X News

Snow Day

In my travels I have been to some of the most remote and obscure places that people live. I have even met some of the people that live in such places whether by choice or accident of birth. I am sorry that I did not pay attention, ask questions or differentiate. I was pretty distracted at the time. They were there and did not leave with me so I figured they liked being there or at least accepted their lot in life.

I have never been to Antarctica. I have been seen the tundra of the Yukon in Canada and Northern Alaska. I have been to Point Barrow and understand what a whole lot of nothingness looks like. I know cold and could not imagine anything being much colder.

Still there was at least one day in my experiences that was quite possibly even colder.

I had left Purdue shortly after my last class on Friday and returned home to Ohio to visit with my mom and dad and do some laundry. I had not been home since shortly after Christmas, almost a whole month had passed. I hadn't done my laundry in that span either. As I had a mandatory 7:30 AM lab first thing on Monday, I left early Sunday for the three hour drive. I had hear a bit of the forecast before setting out and it was supposed to later on in the day. I drove I-70 to the I-465 loop around Indianapolis which I took to I-65. BNy the time I reqached the Indian state line it had begun to snow. Before I reached Indianapolis, the snow was accumulating on the road. It took me two and a half hours to reach the Lafayette off ramp. It took another hour for me to reach my fraternity atop Slater Hill. By the I had to get out and push my car along at times.

The weather had rapidly become the event of the new year. I had a mandatory 7:30 AM lab on a Monday after a blizzard hit Purdue University, in northwestern Indiana. The President of the University was on vacation in South Florida and had not answered his phone until 7:45 AM. From all reports Purdue had never before in its history cancelled a day of classes due to weather.

Let me explain the conditions for those of you that were not ion the midwest for the winters of 1977 and 1978. As I awakened for my 7:30 AM, mandatory-attendance lab, the weather had turned from bad to treacherous and bitterly cold. As I finally set out to my class i had to make stairsteps into the back of snow that was behind my fraternity. The campus water tower was in the back yard, across the driveway and parking lot. I climbed on top of the snowdrift in order to scross the parkingking, over the tops of cars and even drifter over the retaining wall and the chain link fence that surrounded the water tower. As I passed the peak of Slater Hill the tops of the street lamps were at eye level; yes, the part part where the lights are. I could even touched them with my ski glove. The snow drift at that point was 14 feet deep and I was walking on top of the snow that the long dark night of howling, almost hurricane strength wind had crusted over to the point that it would support my weight. Of course if I had found a weak spot during my excursion, I would had fallen into the drift and probably have frozen to death before anyone ever found me or the spring thaw, whichever came first. The wind chill that morning was 73 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Had I not been aptly covered even to the point of wearing a ski mask and goggles my flesh would have frozen within minutes.

I paint this dire picture for a reason. No one at Purdue University on that extreme and exceptional January morning had the balls to make a rather obvious judgement call: cancel classes despite the fact that the President of the University was vacationing in Sunny Florida and away from the reality of the immediate crisis. No one understood the danger that they were putting the students in. How could they? The majority of the administration was snowed in, warm and cozy at home. The administration was so tied to tradition, procedure and protocol that they forgot to be human. First and foremost we are supposed to always be human. I suppose they erred so in that they were human, far too human for my satisfaction that morning.

So, they had to contact the boss, get his permission to do what everyone of them already knew was the right thing to do. The majority of the faculty could not even make it onto campus anyway.

Apparebntly there had never been any sort of contingency plan. The thought of being snowed in had never occurred to anyone. It was as completely unexpected and caught everyone off guard. Who would ever think that it would snow a lot in January in northwestern Indiana. It is usually such a warm balmy place to ride out the winter! Sheesh!

So, even though the DJ on the local radio station kept saying that he could not believe that Purdue had not cancelled classes, and that surely there would be no classes, I was running out of time. I had to attend the class. I could not afford the docking of an entire letter grade for just one absense. That was why I went out in the cold.

I had layered clothing upon clothing and was waddling like an over inflated astronaut or an over levened Pillsbury Dough Boy - take your pick. It was a surreal landscape that I was negotiating. Everything that I knew was at least six and often ten or more feet beneath the wind-blown and crusted over snow upon which I was walking. I made it to my mandatory lab along with at least half of the roster, the other half were likely the saner ones that knew enough to have made the right choice, defying the stupidity of the usually unyielding rules of the University.

There we sat in the sweltering lab, heated with steam from a centrally located plant on campus. It is pretty damned hard to stay awake and alert having come out of arctic cold into the relative steaminess of room temperature. At a few minutes before eight AM, the campus police entered the lab and told us that classes had been cancelled and they at least offered to assist those who lived in dorms back to their rooms. I lived in a fraternity, technically off campus. I had toreturn tot he worst conditions I had ever rexperienced in my life up to that point, hoofing it back to my fraternity house, trudging across the tundra to negotiate a little over a mile that was all uphill. Of course the snow had leveled that distance a little. I had only to aspect to the crust atop the drifts to enjoy a lisurely stroll amongst the gently rolling blinding white drifts.

As any self respecting college frat rat would have done, I knew that there was a place not so far out of the way that sold beer and the proprietor lived over the storefront. I figured he would open even if he had to burrow a hole out of his front door to join with the outside world. As I arrived I was not the only one that had that idea. There were only a few aluminum-lined cases of beer left and I stood my turn in line to purchase a couple of them. Considering the wind chill and everything else I figured that if I really wanted to I could start a party immediately upon returning to my fraternity as the beer I was buying would be adequately and appropriately chilled and fit for general human consumption.

Carrying two cases of beer in ski gloves was a challenge. I admit that I dropped one or the other here and there and had to pick it up again but before 9 AM I was back inside the relative comfort of the usually drafty fraternity. Only then were others stirring to the reality of that the world had become while they had slept. Most were elated at my pronouncement that all classes were cancelled for the day and that the word had come from the campus police. Even so some were skeptical and said that they were calling just for independent confirmation. Lemmings or sheep, it mattered little. They were conditioned to follow the leader and always obey the rules. "Look outside! There is the confirmation."

The lessons: I learned were that people need a figure of authority to tell them not to continue along a path that is personally dangerous and possibly self distructive. A bureaucracy will not act to stand opposed to a directive without the permission of the one that gave the directive regardless the preponderance of evidence that something should be done to contramand a direct order. There are few int he world that take the initiative and they are the ones that lead the parade of lemmings or sheep.

What I think should be worked into every future contingency plan is the concept of 'shit happens'. An extreme departure from the status quo, shit happens is all new territory. It is defined as a set of circumstances that are unpredictable but need to be addressed immediately and in the favor of those most immediately and adversely affected.

If it had not been for finding beer at Arth's Drug Store I might have joined in the protest and outcry for the removal of the President of the University following that incident. Even so his being in Florida and oblivious to the events in the Midwest is a classic example of poor leadership or at least lack of concern. Whichever it was unforgivable. I do not begrudge anyone their time off for vacation but if you have a standing order to still be in charge even when you are on vacation then at least be wary of what is going on in the outside world, the world insich you usually live. The alternative of course is to yield the power and authority to a trustworthy subordinate.

A true leader knows how to delegate and when to follow up.

E

posted by Unknown @ 11:05 PM