Rain, Rain Go Away

Each afternoon, the other asst. mgr. and I have a meeting with the crew sup.’s near the end of the work day, to review projects, routine maintenance, etc. We had just finished yesterday’s meeting when the phone rang in the next room. Since our admin. asst. wasn’t in the office at the moment, I answered.

The call was the university’s automated emergency notification system, announcing that a tornado warning had been declared because of two storm cells west of town, heading due east. I held the phone to my ear with one hand and waved my other arm like a windmill. You’d think, of all the guys in that room, one of them would have seen me. I knocked on the window between the offices. You’d think one of them would have looked up at least. No, all I got was a sarcastic, "Come in." Finally, exasperated, I shouted the asst. mgr.’s name. Ah, that seemed to work. I beckoned madly for him to come over. By the time he sauntered into the room (yes, sauntered), the call was nearly over. I shouted, "Don’t let anyone leave yet!" and finished listening to the call.

When I announced the tornado warning to the supervisors and said that any employees that live west of town were recommended to stay on campus, I was greeted with deafening indifference. No one seemed to care that a tornado, the chance for which is extremely rare in this part of the country, could bear down on us at any second. So much for being helpful. Okay, die for all I care.

Everyone except the mechanic, the admin., the ofc. mgr., and I went home. We did not get a tornado. However, we did experience strong winds, rain, and hail. (Side note: my car was undamaged.) The doors on the west side of our shop began leaking. This has never happened before. As the mechanic and I set sandbags in the doorways (and got pelted by very cold rain), his shop, at the opposite end of the building, started flooding. This has happened before, but never so quickly.

I phoned the on-call supervisor and asked him to return to campus after the hail ended and it was safe to travel. "What hail?" he asked. Meanwhile, the ofc. mgr. and I started filling sandbags. (He just happened to be on his way back from the hardware store with more bags when the storm hit.) The admin. started taking phone calls from flooded buildings on campus, and I told her, after the umpteenth phone call interrupted us as we were trying to fill bags as quickly as we could, while it was still raining, that we’d just get to them in order. The ofc. mgr. and I headed onto campus with our filled bags just as the on-call sup. arrived. We told him to keep filling and we’d be back. (That’ll teach those buildings who gave us work orders to remove the sandbags a couple of weeks ago.)

Long story shorter: I phoned asst. sup. X, whom we thought we had seen still on campus, and asked him to come back and help us. He said he was going to pick up his wife from work but would be back after that. Ofc. mgr. phoned sup. Y, whom we also thought we saw. He said he would not come back to help because he wasn’t on-call and because it wasn’t an emergency. Excuse me? If a tornado warning, hailstorm, fallen limbs, and flooded buildings don’t constitute an emergency, what, pray tell, does?

By the way, this man is officially off my list. He has pulled stuff like this far too often, but we can’t do anything about it because he’s one of Boss’s favored employees (not "favorite" but "favored"). Fine, then, I’ll never call him for help again, and he can just sit at home and rot while everyone else gets the overtime pay. Oh, you should have heard me yesterday, while I was filling sandbags. I was actually swearing!

We didn’t leave campus until 7:15 p.m., which meant that I worked nearly thirteen hours (including lunch). The bummer is that the area we pumped dry after sandbagging got filled again overnight, from a later storm pouring off the roof.

The other major damage was to two greenhouses on campus. Some of my crew, the ofc. mgr. (also our shop safety coordinator), and I helped pick up broken glass and moved plants out of the greenhouses today, once space in other greenhouses had been found. We’re hoping that the research projects weren’t ruined.

I am sick and tired of the rain we have been having. It’s not a gentle, enriching rain. It’s always a downpour, as if Odin and Thor and a few other Norse gods are punishing us for living where saying, "Fjord!" is an anomaly (humorous though it may be). I thought searing heat was the only negative weather in the Southwest. I guess I’ll just have to hunker down and wait it out ("wade" it out?) until hurricane season ends in November.