It's Over

My area of Virginia (usually known as Central Virginia) escaped the worst of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Sandy. Sandy thankfully took a more northerly route before turning inland and all of us should send our thoughts, prayers, and positive energy towards New York and New Jersey where the damage is pretty damn awful. Many people have died (I'll touch a little more on that in a bit). NYC will be more or less shut down for days thanks to flooded subways, flooded electrical systems, damaged roads and buildings, and a construction crane that fell over. The engineers had to climb 74 flights of stairs to get to where they could even evaluate the situation. Good luck with that one, folks. My blogger friends here in VA also seem to have escaped more than some seeping water and some driveway flooding. After a four day weekend, it will be back to work tomorrow.

Time for some Periodic Rants:

1) My employer has for the entire time I have worked there, used plain English to communicate closings to students and employees. For employees, they would just say "Central office and 12 month employees do not report", or "Central office employees and 12 months employees report". For the most part, employees who work less than 12 months (teachers, some support personnel, etc.) don't report unless students report. Here is the notice that was first put on the website telling us we were closed on Monday:

This is in plain English, and makes so much sense. Later on, the website was changed to this:

Now if we see a closure notice on TV, we're going to have to go online (or carry a cheat sheet with us - maybe the county will cover cheat tattooes) to see if any particular class of employee has to come to work. Code 0 is "no employees report". I like Class 0. But leave it to a bureaucracy to make a simple system complicated.

2) Many people died during the storm. Up and down the coast, people lost their lives, many times through their own stupidity. I noted earlier on my Facebook page that "...Two storm-related traffic fatalities have been confirmed by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner." Here's my rant: Why in the heck does it matter that two traffic fatalities are attributed to the storm? Every fricking time it rains around here, at least two people die in traffic-related accidents, but they don't get an official attribution in the VDEM press releases. No one can drive in the rain in Virginia. It's like the roads turn to ice and all brakes fail.

End of rants. Must get sleep so I can get in early tomorrow to avert the almost certain disaster that will await us as we try to bring 23 schools back online and functioning within about an hour before the bell rings!