The Cold Changes Everything

I have had about 25 or so phone calls this week working on the program for the 2015 HR Technology Conference, (note, registration is officially OPEN, please see www.hrtechconference.com/register.html for more details), and I bet 24 of them have started something like this:

Me: Hi, this is Steve

Person A: Hi, Steve how are you? Are you getting all that snow/surviving the winter/staying warm?

Me: Oh man, it has been brutal. <at this point I go on for a minute or two, lamenting the cold, the snow, the giant icicles hanging off of my roof, the fact I have been stuck in my car a couple of times, my kid's school has been closed due to the -25 wind chill, etc.>

Person A: Wow, that is terrible. It is freezing here too <and then Person A takes their turn listing their tales of excruciating snowy woe>

You get the idea.

For most of the eastern half of the USA, the last six weeks or so have been a relentless, crushing, and demotivating series of snow storms, Arctic cold, and more storms.

This kind of sustained period of misery begins to get to you after a while - you lose energy for the things you want to do (creative work, spending time with family and friends), because you have to expend so much more time and energy dealing with the impacts and exigencies of the weather (clearing snow, chipping ice off of the car windows, sitting in traffic jams or waiting out airport delays).

It's has been bad, really bad - and if you are lucky enough to live and work in a part of the country/world that has not had to deal with this winter then you are really fortunate and smart. Also, I hate you.

I don't have a solution for this, except perhaps to say we ought to do something for our teams and colleagues that have been dealing with this ongoing, frosty nightmare.

Maybe give everyone at work a free 'Snow day' off. Except save it for say Friday May 22 - the last day of work before the long Memorial Day weekend. Your people will appreciate having a snow day that is not, you know, actually snowing and one they can enjoy.

So there it is. I am declaring an official 'Snow Day' on May 22. I will bring the BBQ.

Stay warm out there my friends. 

First snow

Woke up this fine Monday morning to the first real snow of the season (see badly lit pic on the right), with maybe an inch or so of the white stuff coating the ground. I am not sure how much more (if anything) we are going to get today, I generally don't pay too much attention to the weather forecasts. Because the weather is pretty much almost always the same as yesterday. In fact there is a study somewhere (I am too lazy to go searching for it at the moment), that suggests that simply predicting a repeat of the prior day's observed weather leads to better, and more accurate forecasts than the ones that are developed by computer models and meteorologists.

But there is one 'truth' about weather that I immediately thought about this morning when I saw the snow: That weather (excepting for catastrophic events like hurricanes or tornados), is only interesting two or three times each year. 

The times when weather is actually interesting, (and exciting and perhaps even inspiring) are the first truly warm day in the Spring, the first cold, clear, crisp day in the Fall, and if you live in such a place that experiences this, the first 'real' snowfall of the year.

Aside from those two or three days each year, weather is more or less the same as yesterday, and consequently less and less interesting as the days/weeks trudge along.

I am on record as being totally done with the cold and snow of Western NY winters and am ready to move to somewhere like Vegas or South Florida as soon as I can pull it off. But even I got a little excited and enthusiastic upon seeing the puffy flakes coming down this morning. And I hate snow. Truly.

What's the bigger, more generally applicable point to this? 

Probably not much of one, sadly. Maybe that it is important to remember that while every day, day after day, can sort of feel the same, that there still exists the potential and capacity for excitement in the ordinary.

This little bit of snow here this morning actually foretells about five months of cold, wet, messy misery for me. But for today, at least for a few hours anyway, it looks incredibly exciting and full of possibility.

Have a great day - and stay warm if your day is a snowy one! 

Precaution and Preparedness

While reading some of the coverage and reports of the recent and massive Typhoon Haiyan I came across a really interesting piece on the Lean Crew site titled Wind Engineering. In the piece, the author breaks down some of the science behind wind speeds and wind pressure experienced in hurricanes, tropical storms, and tornados.Ellsworth Kelly - Colors for a Large Wall, 1951

It is a fascinating look at the topic, and kind of shocking too in a way, to think about the tremendous fury these kinds of natural disasters unleash, and their impact to life and property. In the piece, though, there was one really intriguing observation about preparedness and the precautions that can (or really can't) be taken by people and property owners in advance of these kinds of storms. Have a look and I will have a quick comment or two after the excerpt:

If you don’t live in the middle of the country, you may think of tornados as those storms that destroy trailer parks, but that isn’t giving them their proper respect. The winds in a tornado are typically much higher than those in a hurricane. Residential building codes are written to protect against most hurricanes; they don’t even try to handle tornados. A house’s primary protection against tornado damage is the extremely small probability that a tornado will hit it.

I don't live in tornado country, so I don't personally know if that last point is 100% correct, (but it seems pretty plausible, I mean, is it even possible to build normal, residential housing units that could conceivably withstand 200+ MPH winds?), but let's assume for now that it is in fact accurate.

What it reminds us, all too well, is that we simply can't (and probably shouldn't) attempt to prepare for every possible adverse event that potentially may impact ourselves or our businesses. Some risks, like a tornado, are simply too devastating for us to even have an effective plan for handling. 

But, as in the case of the storm actually making a direct hit on one individual structure, the odds are low enough that it makes the risk acceptable to the thousands if not millions of folks who live in tornado country.

Sometimes, I suppose, the best preparedness is just an honest assessment of the likelihood of impact.

Note: I know you know this but donations can be made for Typhoon Haiyan relief efforts via the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and probably lots of other relief agencies as well.