I
will admit that I feel very guilty that I avoided being in Chicago today. As
some people know I am lucky enough to be allowed to work remotely part of the
time which means that I alternate being in Florida and Chicago on a regular
basis. I was originally supposed to fly in today but given all of the
cancellations and delays, along with the fact that people were being told not
to drive which would make leaving the airport pretty challenging, I decided it
was best to stay in Fort Myers for a few more days. I know, I lead an
incredibly difficult life…
(Admittedly
while the work arrangement is great the fact that Kim and I often seem to be
apart more than we are together does not make for the easiest time for a
marriage. We’ve made it work but it does make it a lot more challenging when
you can’t take out the trash because you are in another time zone.)
They’ve
mentioned that this is the coldest that it has been in twenty years and I can
actually tell you where I was during that cold snap twenty years ago. I was
down in Champaign at the University of Illinois and it is one of my favorite
stories about the campus, what it is like being an engineer and just how
backwards things were at the time. First off, the Illinois campus is massive. I
lived in the most convenient dorm that I could to minimize my walk to classes
and I was still probably five or six blocks from the EE building. However, the
smart students learned every possible path through buildings to get from one
place to the other to avoid being outside for too long. This was very helpful
for us engineers as we felt that any exposure to the sun would result in
instant death.
On
this day (where I think the windchill was 50 below) I believe I walked through
the Psychology building, past the Espresso Royale coffee shop with its
permanently fogged windows but surprisingly warm exhaust vent, through the
Administration building and the Union to make it to Everitt Lab. If I am right
I would never have gone more than a block and a half without walking into
another building and I don’t think I would have been able to make it if I had
to walk any farther.
I
went through my day of EE classes (and if I remember right this was during the
first week of classes so everything was just getting started) and I would say
that the room was about 90% full. This was EE at Illinois, junior year to be
exact, and for the most part the room was full of bitter, downtrodden guys for
whom having to brave the cold was the least of their problems in life. As those
of us who sat in the back of the room once said “I study all the time, never go
out, don’t have a girlfriend and every once in a while we are reminded that
there are thirteen year olds smarter than us.” It was literally a room filled
with people who never even gave a second thought to not going to class that
day.
When
I made it back to my dorm that afternoon and talked to some of my friends they
were all amazed that not only did I make it to class but that there was class
at all. Apparently it was announced in the student newspaper that morning that
due to the temperatures that classes were cancelled and anyone who missed class
would be given an excused absence. However, since no one on the campus outside
of the people who actually wrote the Daily Illini read the Daily Illini, I was
completely oblivious to this fact. So yes, twenty years ago on a day when your
skin would freeze in less than a minute I went to class because no one bothered
to tell me that class was cancelled.
And
people wonder why we put the EE building across the street from a bar…
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