Who Should We Eat First?

I live about 15-20 minutes away from where I work. But on days when it snows, which shockingly enough happens quite frequently during Chicago winters, that commute can stretch into a nightmarishly long haul home. I don’t actually blame this on the snow or lack of salt from our cheap government (Sidenote: Our governor was just impeached!) but on the drivers who don’t realize that you can’t drive the same on slushy pavement as if it were a balmy 70 degree spring day.

So today, on a day when the weather guys are predicting 8 inches of snow, I am not looking forward to driving home.

Which got me to thinking, what if we got so much snow we couldn’t leave the office?

Here is how the scenario played out in my head, which granted, is a bit foggy from spending the morning researching some crazy island off the coast of Norway where people can see the Northern Lights. You know where else you can see the Northern Lights? Canada. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to get to.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Crafting the semi post-apocalyptic world where I find myself should I ever get snowed into my place of employment.

So after the blizzard the is reminiscent of the movie The Day After Tomorrow an e-mail goes out from HR about how no one can leave. The snow is covering the doorways and the temperatures have plummeted. But of course, there is a wacky band of employees who decide they have the testicular fortitude of Admiral Byrd and band together to make a go for it. They bundle up, bid the rest of us a fond farewell and are never seen again. There are not missed.

After this departure the rest of us are left to decide the best course of action. Sure, some people want to come up with various committees to decide the best course of action. While all this discussion was going on I would take all the change and singles I seem to have on me, my recycling bin, and head into the lunch room to purge the vending machine of its contents before anyone else thought of it.

So two hours later when the committees have finally been formed and a highly complicated color coded flow chart has come out I am setting up my own store, charging 6 times to going rate for a package of Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips.

Around midnight I imagine that things really start to break down and alliance and tribes are formed. What starts out like a friendly game of Survivor quickly deteriorates to the second half of Lord of the Flies. People start stealing supplies from the mailroom to fortify their cubicles and mark their territory with flags constructed from brightly colored post its.

In the wee hours of the morning things are quiet. Too quiet. The only sound is the quiet woosh of the heating system and the occasional scurrying of employees as they make their way from one of the office to another.

As dawn breaks so do peoples will. No one can get into the women’s bathroom because it has been infiltrated by those chicks from the fourth floor and they are defending it with soggy rolls of toilet paper chucked out as if they were grenades. Defensive fences made of ballpoint pens line the perimeter of the coffee bar. I have run out of Sun Chips but now have a nice down payment for a new car.

Eventually the sound of massive snow plows making their way toward us can be heard and a collective sigh goes up from the now weary workers. As we all trudge out we bid each other farewell, complete forgetting that we will all see each other in a few days and that locked the annoying co-workers in the storage closest….

And my second grade teacher said I didn’t have an active imagination.

~The Office Scribe