There Snow Way Your Demands Will Work
One of the places where I worked was a casino with a hotel resort. It happened to be in the mountains so, of course, we got snow in the winter. This would vary between three feet and ten feet, depending on how spiteful Mother Nature felt that year.
Everyone who lived there year-round went into apocalypse preparation mode in the fall, knowing that, at some point, we would have a blizzard and that things could and would close down completely. The record was a full week of businesses shutting down and people being ordered to stay at home except in severe emergencies. Having a second freezer in your attached garage was mandatory, and people would buy up all kinds of meats and veggies and prepare soups, stews, and other freezable foods for the inevitable time when we simply had no physical way of leaving the house.
One year, we got some corporate drone of a manager from a much warmer climate where the worst weather they got was heavy rain that sometimes caused flooding. It should be no surprise that my manager had this conversation with the team.
Manager: “All right, so, we have a lot of work to get done, and I’m going to need the team to put the company as a priority. This means that everyone needs to come in, even if the weather is bad. If necessary, we can send a shuttle to pick everyone up.”
She did not like how everyone on the team burst into laughter.
Manager: “I don’t see how this is funny. Be aware that I will write you up for not coming.”
I lived a little further away than most of the employees.
Me: “[Manager], several of us have driveways that go uphill at a pretty steep incline. Your shuttle could be outfitted with steel cleats, and it would still slide backward or sideways despite your best efforts. Now, please explain to me how it could get to my house to pick me up.”
She looked at me like I had two heads and didn’t say anything.
Me: *Raising an eyebrow* “I, and everyone else, will tell you that we will not hike down that hill to meet the shuttle at the bottom, considering the blizzards we get around here. So, I’m going to ask again: how will your shuttles pick us up at the tops of our driveways?”
I never got an answer. Wonder of wonders, I also never got a phone call demanding that I come to work during any of the blizzards that happened while I worked there. Apparently, corporate drones don’t function well at zero (or below) degrees Fahrenheit.
