going all in vs. the icy blast

photo by Susan Marina Dammann Young

I had Monday off on account of the ridiculous weather; a first for me, I think, in my present job..  It came totally unexpected from anything I thought I knew about the theory and practice of managing human resources on a public community college campus.  That theory and all its practices being predicated on the belief that human resources are to be paid as little as possible and that there will rarely be any slack extended to employees.  That's how it goes for the schmucks like me anyway, the people on the front lines who are actually doing the work of the institution and bringing home a paycheck based on an hourly wage.  What the hell, it's the American way; employers everywhere, private and public and nonprofit sectors alike, are doing the same thing.  So be it.

It was brutally cold yesterday morning (and was predicted to be even colder this morning though I didn't get another day off). I got the word late Sunday night that North Hennepin would be closed and I could stay home.  Miz Susan had already been excused from three days of work at her St. Paul Schools gig due to the cold and it would have been nice if we'd have been able to have a day off together.  Nope.  Even though St. Paul Schools were closed to students on both Monday and Tuesday, teachers were required to report.  I've heard that St. Paul was one of only a few districts which required its teachers to show up, presumably to attend an endless string of meetings calculated to help raise St. Paul school kids' standardized test scores.  It's nice to know that there are other employers out there which enjoy grinding their staffs down as much as mine does.  Get this.  For the first three days of the cold closings, only essential staff were required to report.  These included the principals and the APs and such and some of the maintenance staff to make sure the pipes didn't freeze.  Not included were the teachers, presumably because administration considers teachers to be less than essential to the work of the district.  Come days 4 and 5 though, the teachers suddenly found themselves on the rolls of essential staff, presumably because administration realized it was shelling out payroll dollars without the satisfaction of having its staff under its direct control.  I'm waiting to hear about the memo that tells the teachers that they're off that essential staff list and back to being the schmucks we all know they are.

Susan didn't have to go in until 9, a nice concession.  I wished her well as she pulled away from the curb, commiserated with one of the neighbors whose car wouldn't start and headed back inside for a rare day home alone.  I made the most of it.

I vacuumed most of the carpets.  I cleaned the cats' box.  I straightened up the kitchen.  I took the last remnants of Christmas decor (the hodgepodge of holiday-themed coffee mugs) to the basement.  In short, I did the bare minimum which I thought might be required for Susan not to go off on me when she got home for being the lazy, worthless slacker she now regrets marrying.

But doing that bare minimum allowed me a free conscience to zip down University Avenue for stops at the Goodwill and Menard's.  The Goodwill made for a disappointing haul: a tall fluted milk glass, a mug with appliqued songbirds (both nods to Susan) and a fire engine bright red long sleeved t-shirt for me.  Pay no mind to the fact that it probably started its life as a pajama top in the Penney's catalog; now it's a long sleeved t-shirt which I will be wearing as soon as I can get it washed and dried.  As I like to say, it'll be in the rotation.

Oh, but Menard's was another story altogether.  I did some major shopping at Menard's and I came out of that place with a cart full of snow shovels and other assorted necessities of January middle class life.  It was $75 (plus tax) worth of snow removal equipment including a snazzy telescoping snowbrush and scraper with a swiveling brush so that you can sweep the snow off the hood of your car in two directions at right angles to each other.  Not you and your car so much as Miz Susan and her Tahoe.  No longer will she have to clamber up onto that big Chevrolet hood to clear the windshield.  The new snowbrush and scraper is going to solve all her problems.  As a bonus, I bought a new set of jumper cables for the trunk of the Camry.  Winter has sucked so far but I might have it on the run.

I was so excited by the new arsenal that I made Miz Susan take a picture of me.  My pose is modeled on the snap which Lee Harvey Oswald made his wife take years ago down in Dallas. The clenched newspaper isn't Lee's free Cuba rag; its headline says something about the icy blast in the title of this post.  I couldn't match LHO's smarmy smirk but I like to think that the picture captures my spirit of a grim commitment to the task at hand.  I'm starting to believe that we're gonna beat this winter thing after all.