So Monday night, or really more like 11:20 on Monday night, my phone went off with that horrible screeching emergency alert tone, the one that sounds like the microwave and the smoke detector had a baby. I actually knocked my water glass off the nightstand. Turns out it wasn't a fire, it was the county telling me a "potentially historic and life-threatening blizzard" was about to bury the tri-state area under two to three feet of snow. Governor's office, mayor's office, National Weather Service, all of it, everybody was using words like "crippling" and "paralyzing." The subway got shut down at 11pm that night, which as far as I know had never happened before for snow, not ever, not even during Sandy the trains kept running as long as they could.
So naturally I did what every other person within a hundred miles did, which is go stand in a grocery store at 9am on a Tuesday next to forty other people all reaching for the same four items. Bread, milk, batteries, and for some reason bananas, always bananas, I don't understand the banana thing but it happens every single time. The shelves where the bottled water usually sits were just gone, like someone had vacuumed them. I bought a flashlight I already owned two of because I couldn't remember where I put the other ones. This is apparently a permanent part of my personality now.
And then, well. Central Park ended up with something like 9.8 inches. Not nothing, a real snow, shovel-your-steps kind of snow, but nowhere close to two feet. Long Island got hammered though, and so did Massachusetts, Worcester was buried under something like three feet. The storm just shifted about fifty or sixty miles east of where everyone braced for it, and that fifty miles was the difference between "worst blizzard in city history" and "eh, decent snow day."
The part that actually got me curious enough to go read about it afterward is that this wasn't really a media screwup so much as a forecasting one. The two big models meteorologists lean on, the European one and the American one, were apparently off from each other by a huge margin on exactly where the heaviest band would land, and pretty much everyone on TV went with the scarier version, which, fine, I get it, better to over-warn people than under-warn them. A few of the Weather Channel folks basically apologized on air for how it played out, which I respected honestly. Nobody likes admitting they were wrong on live television.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's a small one but I think it matters: waking a whole metro area up at 11pm with the loudest possible alarm, for something that turns into a light dusting by comparison, trains people to ignore the alarm. That's the real cost. Not the wasted bread and batteries, not even the day of work everyone got to skip. It's that the next time that phone screams at 11pm, a bunch of us are going to roll over and go back to sleep instead of checking what it says. I'd rather they be a little more careful about when they pull that trigger, even if it means being less dramatic about it.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, shoveling out my car on Wednesday with my gloves soaked through because I never remember to buy the good ones, I saw that Apple had posted something like 18 billion dollars in profit for the quarter, the biggest quarterly profit any public company has ever reported. Just casually, in the same news cycle as the blizzard that wasn't. Must be nice, I thought, standing there in slush up to my ankles. That's it, that's the whole thought I had about it. Eighteen billion dollars and I still can't get my car door to unstick without kicking it.
By Thursday the whole thing already felt like old news, the way these things always do around here. The milk I panic-bought is still sitting in my fridge, half gone, and I keep meaning to make something with it before it turns. The extra flashlight is back in the drawer with its siblings. And somewhere out on Long Island people are still digging out driveways while the rest of us already moved on to complaining about something else entirely.