Liberal Leave

I love to joke that "Liberal Leave" means that Liberals can stay home, but conservatives have to come in to the office. As a moderate, I get to come in late.

Several years ago I worked as a temp at a company owned by... well, by someone who now owns a major local sports franchise. One January day it was snowing pretty heavily and then it began to freeze and eventually we ended up with a pretty nasty ice storm. CEO and his assistant were off at a series of dog-and-pony shows and the assistant would call in every so often to pick up messages and check in. Around 10:30 I told her that it was getting icy and that staff were starting to leave, she told me that yeah, that happens, but that they go and she stays. We agreed that I would stay until about 4:00 (instead of my usual 6:00) so that I could go home before dark and I returned to surfing the internet, playing Freecell, reading, and taking messages for CEO. (In a job that had a fair number of ups and downs, being allowed to play with the computers was a definite up.)

The staff had been leaving steadily all day and the last real staffer left at 2:30, leaving me and the security guard. Did I mention that I was a temp? I could have cleaned out the place and fled and all they could have done was sued Kelly Services. Good grief. At 2:45 the security guard left. And so at 3:00, did I. I actually felt bad that I was leaving early, although why I couldn't tell you. CEO's assistant did make the very good point that in situations like that it pays to leave last because then everyone else is off the road and she was right - outside of being scary slippery, my commute home was much easier than it would have been had I been sharing the road with the genius drivers we get around here.

So today we have had snow. Now we have sleet and freezing rain. Some people think that "IRS audit" are verys scary words, but they are nothing on "sleet and freezing rain." At least not around here.

The worst commute home I ever had was a big winter snow storm when I was in college. Now, as we all know one of the hallmarks of the geezer is the unfavorable comparison of going to school in bad weather then and now and I'm totally owning my geezerhood. "These kids today!" There. I said it. "Uphill all the way!" Check. "They didn't just cancel school willy-nilly when I was a girl, no, sir!" Blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda. We were nearly eaten by bears every day, too. And we didn't have these fancy-pants computers, no we didn't. We carved our assignments out on big stone slabs. Etc.

But it is true that back in the day the University of Maryland didn't close for sissy stuff like weather because - back in the day - there wasn't a microwave in every dorm room and if the university closed, the dining hall staff didn't come in and the dormers wouldn't get fed. So we hauled our sorry butts to school back in the day, unlike these kids today. Hmph.

Well, one storm was bad enough that the University closed around 1:00 pm. The snow was coming down in cubic feet rather than flakes and the prospect of several thousand commuter students taking over the student union for the duration was too much even for Chancellor Kirwan and President Toll, so the University ---- closed. At the time I lived about 7 miles from campus and those 7 miles took 6 hours to traverse. Oy. Now, of course, they close the campus if it gets overcast. These kids today.

Of course, I am one of the "kids" the previous generation would kvetch about, so it's all part of life's rich pageant. And I remember back when I was a teenager and Mom worked for the State of Maryland. If Mom wanted to be out of the office, she had to get a signed leave slip which was pretty much a permission slip for grown ups. Her supervisor would have to sign it and it had to be submitted well in advance of the requested time off.

This always created a problem on snow days because if the difficulty in time travelling that they had back then, so the government (or ... someone, I dunno) created "Liberal Leave," meaning that staffers could simply call in and take leave without advance permission rather than experiencing whatever punitive measures they would otherwise incur.

I'm so used to the modern day private sector that for me "Liberal Leave" is just the set up to a fairly lame joke and our new staffers here at the office, who are all young, very, very young have never worked in an environment where they had to get permission to be out of the office. But the federal government still uses it and it still has meaning for them.

So here's to whoever thought up "Liberal Leave." And as a moderate, I'm going home early.