Auntie Em, Auntie Em!

One of the many benefits of living in New England (I consider certain parts of New York to be "New England" even though technically it's not) is that you are basically free from major natural disasters. Sure, I survived a pretty bad ass ice storm in 1997 and had no power or water for a week, but it was still a rarity. And now I live much further south in New York where the chance of an ice storm is even less of a possibility. But not a tornado apparently.

So yesterday we are all sitting in our Dilbert cubicles when the phone intercom goes off: "Hello everyone, this is R., a tornado has been spotted in the area, please seek shelter immediately." Huh?? "Is he serious?" I say to my cubicle-mate. My museum has quite a lot of scientists so I thought maybe this was PhD humor gone awry. Two more minutes pass as we are staring out the windows at the very mildly grey sky. Then the phone intercom goes off again: "By 'seek shelter' I mean that everyone should proceed down to the basement."

So we head to the basement and just sort of stand there with strange looks on our faces. I ask someone for more details and find out that the tornado was spotted about a 1/2 mile from B.'s office. I call him immediately and tell him to go to the basement. Does he actually go to the basement? No. Of course not! Why would an entire building full of engineers do something so sensible when you could just as easily walk outside in the hail storm to take pictures of the sky?

Look at that wall of black clouds!

The clouds when they began to swirl.

Luckily the tornado never completely formed and B. and his employees did eventually smarten up and head to the basement. Good thing too, because I later learned that one of the biggest mistakes people make with tornadoes is thinking that they'll be able to see them coming, when in fact they can just drop out of the sky. Obviously B. and his fellow engineers didn't watch enough Wizard of Oz growing up!