Somehow when the weather is terrible, the inner children come out in the professional workplace. People are giggling at their desks, someone is heating up hot chocolate mix, someone is munching on animal crackers (that would be me), and everyone has weather.com up as if the radar is going to give us a personal message to just go home already.

It’s very reminiscent of being in elementary and whispering that maybe, just maybe the teacher will announce an early out or, better yet, maybe tomorrow will be a snow day!

Except that now we’re adults and we don’t get snow days anymore. So we just hope for the impossible and check the windows and say, “Man, doesn’t it look terrible out there?” and then proceed to swap winter war stories about friends of friends who said that they heard someone say that there are 35 cards in the ditch within a 5 mile range on I-80. And then someone else tops that story and then someone else tops that story until, within a few minutes time, we’ve decided that we’re all going to die from the gusting wind that is going to tear the building apart and hurl us into the blizzard where we’ll freeze. And then someone will say, “Wouldn’t it just be better if we all just went home?”

But we don’t. Because we’re corporate American adults now and we don’t get snow days anymore. So we drink our hot chocolate, top of our coffee, nibble on our crackers, and think, “As long as I get home tonight…I’d rather be stranded there than here.”