Logic take a holiday, then retires
Here's a riddle for you:
I am a mid-Atlantic city. I have two, maybe three days a year in which I get snow and/or ice. I'm not as prepared to handle these days as cities like Chicago, Buffalo or Boston. Why not?Oh, sure. You think it's easy, right? Apparently, it's nearly impossible to figure out. Otherwise-intelligent people get hung up on this every year, ranting about DC's inability to handle snow days, wondering why the city shuts down the government for two or three days a winter instead of raising taxes to have a fleet of snow plows standing by for that rare occurrence.
It's really part of a flaw in logic that comes up in a lot of arguments: the inability to credit anything to frequency. It's why a shooting in a high crime neighborhood is less likely to make news than a shooting in a low crime neighborhood. Or why a tornado in downtown Nashville is reported nationwide, but a tornado in rural Kansas barely registers outside state lines. Or why San Francisco makes sure it's buildings are earthquake-safe, which is something that El Paso doesn't really worry about too much.
Maybe this has more to do with DC being a place filled with people who grew up somewhere else. Maybe this is a way for people to take an opportunity to feel like where they're from is vastly superior, which is something we all like doing every now and then. Maybe it's just our inevitable frustration when things don't fall smoothly and evenly into place. But no matter what, the complaining has to stop, because it's an argument against fine logic.
And yes, I realize that I'm complaining about complaining so don't bother to point that out.
6 comments:
Hey! Don't you realize that all you're doing here is comp--
Oh.
Never mind.
Thank you! I've tried to make that point to my friends/coworkers from upstate NY for years. So what if Buffalo budgets tons of money on state-of-the-art snow plowing techniques? They have enough snow to warrant that (11+ ft right now in Oswego county!), plus to be frank, it's not like they have a lot of other shit to spend their money on up there. I don't mind dealing with the occasional snow-in knowing that the money needed for an extra plow went towards protecting us from the terrorists, or towards urban renewal projects, or even towards tourist attractions and sports stadia.
Although I do have to mention that while driving to work on I-95 this morning, I passed by three snow plows who were immediately behind each other in the left lane. As opposed to having each one plow a different lane, or spacing them out so each one takes a different stretch of highway. So while I don't expect mid-Atlantic plowers to be as adept at their jobs as their Canadian counterparts, I will concede that they could use some more common sense at times.
The problem with DC is that sometimes they get it and sometimes they don't. But in general, I think DC does an ok job considering that while half the city may be from Buffalo, the other half is from places like San Antonio.
Personally, I always longed for snow days, or really any excuse not to have to work. When I lived in Kansas, I used to regularly gamble with my homework and lose. Every DC snow day I ever got felt like vindication. In truth, the big snow days that shut down the city for days are relative few and far between. Most of the time you might get a half day.
If it makes you feel any better, the same happens here in Holland whenever it looks like it might snow somewhere near by. And last week, half of the UK closed up shop, including London, for a few hours of snow.
Something I forgot to mention in the post: my parents were in town last week and we had a little bit of snow here in DC and my mom remarked with a laugh at how terrible everyone would drive on the first day of a snowstorm...in Alaska. And I remembered that as well; that in spite of the studded snow tires and fleets of snow plows, there were still drivers skidding all over the roads and plows doing stupid things. So really, maybe the basis for the complaints about DC in the snow are the same as for any stereotype: in your native environment, you see stupidity on an individual level, whereas in a foreign environment, you blame the whole.
I thought the Alaskan drivers skidding all over the road were doing it for fun, like it was a sport or something. I'm sure it was on purpose. Like doing donuts in your high school parking lot, but more adventurous.
Amen, Reid! Those haters drove me nuts! So what if their city had it more together than DC - they're getting a snow day!
BTW, you might think I can pull rank now that I live in Colorado, but no way. Whenever it snows in the mountains, the main highway into the Rockies closes down all the time!!
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