An Inconvenient Ruth

I meant to post about this earlier but I finally got the time to do so.

Last Monday, we had some really nasty winter weather roll into the upper Northwest. As a former Clevelander, it was nothing to me. However, it absolutely paralyzed the Seattle area. This is basically for three reasons:

1) No one here knows how to drive in snow and ice.
2) A LOT of people live on top of hills and mountains.
3) There are roughly 17 snow plows / salt trucks for the entirety of King County (which is where most of the cities include Seattle reside).

So here's the story. We started hearing about the storm early in the day. Unfortunately, we couldn't get out of work because one of the carpoolers was behind. We finally left about 5pm. By that time, the snow was really coming down. We hit the highway and got through I-90 ok and then onto 405-S. That started getting really congested around the first of two exits we could take to get home. We opted to take the first exit and that proved a fatal mistake. It literally took us about 3 hours to go roughly 2 miles through downtown Renton. At one point, I literally got out of the car and walked about a mile ahead to see if cars were getting up the hill. (If they weren't, there was no reason to stay in that traffic.) One of the ladies I carpool with was determined we were getting home, the other was panicky and wanted to just get a hotel room. Me, I was just being surprisingly light-hearted about the whole affair. Finally, I took the wheel from the owner of the car as I was the only one who could drive in snow.

The weird part about all of this is how the populace reacted. First, traffic laws went right out the window. It was the wild west out there and we saw one cop in 5 hours. Myself, I fudged a couple of times but I doubt there was anyone who cared. The other oddity, is that people were literally abandoning their cards IN THE MIDDLE OF THE INTERSTATE AND SIDE ROADS and walking away. It had a very weird "end of the world" look to it as large groups of people were just walking around with cars littered around the roadway. A fella I work with said the hill leading up to his house had 55 abandoned cars at the bottom.

At the end of the day, literally, it took us almost 5 hours to go 20 miles. Now this was happening in the middle of Monday Night Football so the 65,000 Seahawks fans had no idea what was happening with the roads until the game ended. Many of those people didn't get home until the next morning because, and I am NOT making this up, they were stopped in traffic on the highway to the point where TV crews were walking between the cars taping people who were sound asleep at their steering wheel.

Our street never got salted or plowed nor did the previous two streets leading to my house. The first of those two is a major street, with several very steep hills and two schools on it.

They kept saying that this was the kind of collective weather happening that will become legend in this area, and I don't doubt it. It was kind of fun while it was going on only for the sheer lunacy it inspired.

Oh, and my title? Our European rep, Ruth, picked this last week to come visit. With most of the office out, I'm not sure it was as productive as it could have been.