Snow Days Suck!

We've had WAYYYYY too many snow days this semester already. We started off with a snow day - so much for that first day of classes (a Tuesday). The second week, we had a snow day on Thursday. And then this week, we had Tuesday and Wednesday off.

Snow Days were great when you were a student - they aren't all that exciting now that I'm a staff member. When I wake up in the morning and see that e-mail telling me that it's a snow day, a tiny part of me still cheers. I'm not sure why - maybe it's just because we've been socialized to think that snow days are awesome; or it's the memories of being excited about snow days. But for me, a snow day doesn't change much. Hall Directors are emergency personnel. So I still have to go to the office. Meetings with residents of the building still take place. Maybe a few meetings with other offices and our central staff are cancelled, but that doesn't significantly free up my schedule; especially not this week that's been crammed with RA Interviews and preparing for programs. And honestly, not having those meetings is sometimes way more frustrating than it'd be to lose the time that the meeting would take up.

I feel pretty disconnected from the rest of campus and the central office because I haven't had a one-on-one with my supervisor in a while and now we are not having our staff meeting tomorrow. I also have a list of offices that I really need to talk to but haven't been able to because they've been closed.

On Tuesday, we had our Invisible Children Challenge Kick-off event (in spite of the snow day) and attendance was somewhat limited because of the weather. And then I started getting all these e-mails from students who were interested in coming but couldn't make it because of the snow. And it's AWESOME that they are interested in the Challenge, but this means I now have to organize another Kick-off Event - and for that I have to reserve a room in the Student Union, which means I need the Reservations Office to be open, so I can contact them, and it also means more work for me.

Snow days also mean that our students are hanging out and are getting bored. Some of them are "just bored" and they've been coming down to hang out in the office or have been going through my personal DVD collection; those are "the good ones." The others have decided to use the extra free time to make a lot of noise - before and after quiet hours - have parties and get drunk. We've had serious increases in policy violations on and around the snow days. This is NOT how I wanted to start the semester off. Soon I'll have had more violations in these first few weeks than I had all last semester.

So let's all keep our fingers crossed that this was it for snow days!