We’ve finally gotten a bit of snow here, and the reaction has been comical.

Thursday there was a bit of powered sugar on the ground – nothing serious, but enough to make it kind of white-ish outside. I didn’t think anything of it until I was about to head out to school. “Maybe there’s a delay,” I thought. As staff I’d still have to be there at regular time, but still – I’d allow myself maybe fifteen minutes. I pulled up the Asheville City School’s site (after loading IE – the site doesn’t render properly in a standards-compliant browser) and suddenly realized I had a lot more than fifteen minutes. “School closed.”

Friday it was similar. At three in the afternoon, the principal came over the intercom saying that she knew people were eager to get out and stock up for the weekend. What? Well, there’s a storm coming, don’t you know?

It hit Saturday night, while we were at friends’ house just north of Asheville. It was snowing enough there that we drove home on I-26 at about thirty-five to forty miles an hour. In town, there was significantly less accumulation. Still, had it been a day later, I’d have another free day – and another day tacked onto the end of the year.

The point of all this? People here simply overreact to snow. Thursday there was maybe an inch and a half on the ground and people were panicking. Right now there’s about the same, and all the kids in the area are probably convinced that there’ll be no school tomorrow.

If northern Europe were run in a similar manner, there’d be no school from November to April!