Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

We’re under a winter storm threat, with snow and prolonged freezing temperatures expected, and even though the skies are partly sunny right now the warning is already disrupting my schedule for the week ahead because we could get as much as three inches of snow. I know that sounds funny to people in places that are used to snow and, to be fair, Nashville does get enough snow that we should be used to it by now. Also there are a lot of people who’ve moved here from other places and they should have brought their snow experience with them. I even asked a coworker who’d moved here from Cleveland—Ohio, not Tennessee—how people in her hometown dealt with heavy snow.

“Oh, we know exactly what to do,” she said. “When there’s really heavy snow we stay home.”

That’s wise advice and with telecommuting it’s a lot easier to do that and still get work done, although a part of me misses the days when my wife and I had a vehicle with four-wheel drive and there were snow days when I’d be the only person in the office.

The downside of this winter weather warning is that I’d spent the last two weeks juggling multiple schedules so I could give a tour of where I work to some new employees. I really enjoy giving tours and of course they can happen at any time but I hate having to flood people with meeting requests that then get cancelled followed by new requests.

As my wife was reading off the specifics of the storm warning there was this note at the end: “Mosquito impact is expected to be minimal.”

So there is a bright side to it.

A coworker asked me where I went for lunch every day and then immediately apologized because she realized that, well, that’s an invasive question. She was just curious because every day at noon I pass by her cubicle with my journal. Not that I have anything to hide but I’d never ask someone where they go because they might have their reasons for wanting to keep that information private. I don’t know if anyone else is like me but when I’m off the clock I want to get as far away from work as possible, and when I’ve gone to lunch with people I work with I try to steer the conversations to pretty much anything but work. I have the advantage of working on a college campus and even when classes are in session there are a lot of empty classrooms or just lounge spaces where I can hide out for half an hour. I’ve worked in office buildings out in the middle of nowhere and felt trapped during lunch because there wasn’t anywhere to go. There was a break room and a dining area with vending machines but if I wanted to get out and walk, go somewhere truly away from work, my options were the parking lot or, just beyond that, the interstate.

It’s really funny to me that, as is the case with a lot of older college campuses, there are lots of buildings that have old exteriors but they’ve been renovated from the inside, usually over years, sometimes over decades, and that’s created some mazelike interiors with rooms I think even people who work in those buildings forget are there. One of these days one of those buildings may be knocked down entirely and they’ll find a grizzled old professor behind a wall, still diligently working away at a monograph on Phoenician etymology.

Anyway, without really thinking about it I started telling the coworker that some days I’d walk a few buildings over to one that has a nice lounge area and an outdoor patio that no one else seems to know about since it was only added during a renovation that happened about five years ago. It wasn’t until I was on my way there that I realized I’d given away a valuable secret and now I need to find a new place to get away. Maybe there’s a space next to that professor’s office.

I’ve seen the “Please Let Me Merge Before I Start Crying” sticker several times now, including one version that had musical notes around it which made me think there was a song with that line in it. However I couldn’t find one. There should be a song. What I did find was that some people are annoyed by the sticker, which I don’t understand. Every time I see it I feel sorry for the driver and think, well, of course I’m going to let you merge. Then I realize the only reason I’m seeing it is because they’re in front of me, probably because I’ve let them merge. That makes me feel a little better. I’ve done a small thing to keep someone from crying. Of course I also avoid driving on interstates as much as I can—I’ll take the slightly slower stop-and-start traffic of regular roads simply because anything over 60MPH makes me nervous. I’ve also done the math, or rather the maps. In most cases the hassle of getting to the on-ramp, going down the interstate, and then getting to the off-ramp wouldn’t save me more than a few minutes. My morning commute would actually be longer if I took the interstate, at least in part because of all the traffic. Most of it would be the trucks getting an early start on their long hauls.

On the subject of bumper stickers I used to work in customer service for a company that provided truckers with fuel and other costs on the road as well as their paychecks. Most of the time the truckers I talked to were nice and grateful for the help but once in a while something would go wrong and a few got really, really angry. One day as my coworkers and I were sitting at our stations answering the phones the higher-ups handed out bumper stickers with the company logo. We all smiled politely and quietly slipped them into the trash. The last thing we all wanted was for some angry truck driver to come up behind us on the interstate and take out all that frustration on our car.

Most of the time while driving, though, I don’t really notice bumper stickers, or, if I do, they’re too small or go by too fast for me to read them and I’m focused on driving. Sometimes while parked and walking somewhere I’ll see a car with a fun collection of bumper stickers that makes me want to stop and wait until the driver comes back just so I can say, “Hey, I really like your style.”

That may be a little bit too forward.