White Out!

Last week I was in Colorado Springs for work. In the wee hours of Thursday morning a blizzard rolled through. And being from New Hampshire, I don’t toss around the word "blizzard" cavalierly. It was quite impressive. All day Thursday I and my fellow residents at a hotel near Pike's Peak were trapped inside. Horror of horrors: for most of the time, the internet went out! And the TV behaved like a low budget commercial for cable providers: every ten seconds or so it would lose its satellite connection and then spend ten or twenty seconds reacquiring, only to repeat the cycle endlessly. At some point most of the guests gathered in the lounge and, having nothing else to do, we talked to each other! It was strange.

The whole day had a kind of Stephen King atmosphere. Like The Shining. Or Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. Except, I’m happy to report, guests didn’t go missing one-by-one.

By Friday everything was back to normal. The roads had been cleared; in fact the temperature went up to 50 degrees. That, along with the clear skies, made short work of most of the snow. At the hotel, we all went back to ignoring one another, the sense of camaraderie forgotten. Progress.