LESSON OF ATLANTA SNOWJAM 2014!

Vanity | 1/29/2014 | Dick Bachert

[Dick Bachert]

As this is written, Atlanta is still in the throes of another winter weather situation. The TV is filled with images of major highways littered with abandoned vehicles. Many of their owners are stranded in make-shift shelters until warmer weather makes the roads passable again.

The governor and other officials just concluded a news conference to explain how the mess unfolded and that they've learned much from this experience.

One of the lessons they “learned” is that, once the potential severity of this event became obvious, dismissing public and private employees all at once to try to get home was a really bad idea as it is many of their abandoned vehicles now clogging the roads, making it impossible for the salt and sand trucks to do their thing.

How unfortunate that so many of these state officials and private business management folks seem to be slow learners. We've had a number of these events in years past and the result is the same: Hundreds of thousands of gallons of expensive fuel burned, multiple thousands of people stranded, some folks even dying in accidents or from exposure, etc.

There IS a sensible solution for at least SOME of these folks and the problems they faced, a solution that could also seriously curtail the massive and growing year round Atlanta traffic rush hour gridlock and, just incidentally, conserve that precious fuel and reduce the CO2 and other emissions the Algore and the other “climate change” charlatans insist causes “global warming” (despite growing evidence that they're nuts).

In the 60s and 70s, Tom Peters, an American writer on business management practices, wrote and spoke extensively on what he called the “Electronic Cottage.” It was a very sensible proposal made possible by the coming of age of the electronic revolution.

In a nutshell, his proposal, even MORE sensible now that the electronic revolution has had 50 years to mature, is that, unless a worker's occupation absolutely required that he leave his home each day to drive to where he performs his duties, the need for him to do so was becoming unnecessary. If he or she was one of the growing number of INFORMATION workers from whom an employer needed mainly or only an INFORMATION WORK PRODUCT, that product could just as easily be created in an “electronic cottage” in some small portion of his or her home.

If I have to explain the societal benefits of that, please stop reading now as you may be one of Obama's no/low information folks and wouldn't grasp how it would save vast amounts of valuable energy resources and human time as folks no longer would need to sit in stop and go rush hours breathing noxious fumes for several hours each day. If you are one of those whose job requires you to navigate a rush hour twice a day, try to imagine how YOUR rush hour experience might improve with half or more of the vehicles removed from the highways?

Speaking of noxious fumes, I sincerely believe that these big city rush hours and those noxious fumes are damaging our brains, exacerbating the dumbing down begun in the government schools to the point where 47% or so of us actually believed the BS laid down my Obama and put an unvetted, unqualified, Marxist community organizer in office – TWICE – and still haven't noticed that his every act is designed to destroy America.

(I'm tempted to raise the issue of school busing but that's a topic for another rant.)

There is another reason why Peters' common sense proposal has not gained more traction. That is the ego driven flaw that dictates that the corporate guy who makes it up the food chain to a corner office feels the need to be able to periodically stroll from that office and gaze around at a mass of cubicle enclosed fellow humans and know that they are “his” people. Their absence from his sight would cause him to feel less important and secure.

And, speaking of security, it COULD come to pass that those above him in that food chain might begin to question just why HE is in that corner office. Can't have that sort of thing now, can we, lest it ripple up and down the entire food chain.

So, while I don't hold out much hope that the electronic cottage with all its many benefits will get any serious consideration, it is possible that coming events here might force it upon us.

[editor-surveyor]

If the ice is truly hard frozen, its easy to drive on. When it begins to thaw it gets really nasty.

[SamAdams76]

There is no time like snow time when it comes to major Southern cities. It is not for the wanted that Applebees serves up fare that is way too overpriced with respect to the quality served up. Can it be said of all of us that we have been to hell and back and then some? I do not like the Atlanta traffic either but you should fly into Hartsfield with a connecting flight that departs only ten minutes hence. Now that translates into some frantic out-of-breath running.

Snow? I'll give you some Atlanta snow. It's an intuitive way to sort the Sochi goings-on by weather event and date, and the events are listed by an actual American time zone. So there you go. Have fun everyone.