I don’t know— I don’t think this is the case, but I don’t know– if any other jobs outside of education ever are in a position where they experience the phenomenon known as the “two hour delay.” I actually have not experienced very many of them, as my previous district never used them; school was either in session or cancelled, and the only delay I remember ever having turned into a cancellation pretty quickly.

But today the weather was shit in a very specific way at 5:30 in the morning, and promising to be substantially less shit in a couple of hours, and as a result nearly every district in northern Indiana called a two hour delay today. And you would think that as someone who is used to being up at a certain time, being dressed and out of the shower by a certain time, in the car at a certain time, and at work at a certain time, the process of simply adding two hours to all of those things would not be especially complicated. 

You would be wrong.

I did, in fact, manage to make it into work in time, but the amount of times I had to recalculate literally all of those times up there, oftentimes being completely unable to remember simple things like when do I leave for work? was truly Goddamned ridiculous. School starts two hours later than normal! That’s all! It sounds uncomplicated, but that’s before you realize that you have completely forgotten when school usually starts, what time you get up (never mind that the alarms are literally still active on your watch) or how long it should take to get to work. I spent the whole morning half-asleep and trying desperately to figure out how much longer I could reasonably stay in bed versus how long I could wait to extract every possible second of bed time instead of, say, getting a perfectly reasonable hour and a half of extra sleep and then having time for a leisurely cup of coffee in a comfortable chair instead of tumbling out of the house at high speed and at the last minute.

I got out of the shower and managed to convince myself that school was starting in ten minutes. I swear to you that my heart rate and my blood pressure spiked. All of this because of an inability to add two to a number.

And it’s entirely possible that tomorrow we get to do the exact same thing again, then a foot of snow on Friday but probably after school is over, then a three-day weekend, then three days of ten below zero before wind chill. So January is proceeding according to expectations so far.