Snow Days, Nor’easters and the Office That Stayed Open

In New Jersey, weather forecasts have a special power. A single rumor of a nor’easter and the entire state enters a shared ritual: the grocery run, the weather app refresh, the group chat that suddenly has forty messages. By the time the first flake lands, everyone has an opinion about whether the office will be open.

The 5 a.m. group chat

Somebody always wakes up early, looks out the window, and starts the thread. The first message is a photo of a driveway. The second is a question mark. Within minutes a dozen coworkers have weighed in with road reports from their own streets, each one slightly different, and none of them conclusive.

Then comes the official message from management, usually a masterpiece of careful wording. Work remotely if you can. Come in if you must. Use your judgment. Everyone reads it three times and still manages to interpret it differently.

The people you meet in a storm

Every office has the same cast. The Early Bird shovels, then shovels again, then sends a proud photo of the result. The Remote Convert is delighted by the whole thing and answers email from a couch with a blanket. The Optimist insists the roads are fine, while the Realist quietly checks the transit alerts.

And then there is the Legend, the one coworker who somehow made it in, looks mildly windblown, and is now at their desk as if nothing happened. The office respects this enormously and also finds it a little suspicious.

The quiet office is a funny place

If the office is open but half empty, the mood changes. Meetings shrink. The phones are calmer. People who normally send email to each other from ten feet away actually talk. Someone puts on a pot of something warm, and a handful of colleagues drift into the break room to compare commute stories like veterans of a minor expedition.

There is a small, cheerful spirit to it. Everyone who is there chose to be there, or at least had no choice in the matter, and that makes a team. The stories get better as the day goes on. By afternoon, the drive that took forty minutes has been upgraded in the retelling to a heroic voyage.

Plan for the part you can control

You cannot control a storm, but you can control whether the break room is stocked when it hits. A delivery that gets pushed back a day by the weather is a delivery you wish you had placed a little earlier. That is the whole lesson, and it applies to more than water.

Our office water delivery comes in 5-gallon jugs at $13.00 per bottle, plus a $5.00 delivery fee per order, with a 3-bottle minimum. If the forecast looks interesting, it is a good week to order ahead so the break room is ready no matter what the sky decides.

Whatever the storm does, the office will tell the story for weeks: who shoveled what, whose street was plowed first, and who swears the snow was deeper at their house. It is a very New Jersey kind of bonding, and it is hard to beat. Stay warm, shovel with your knees, and may the roads be clear by Thursday.