Srsly?

OK, 7am update - still raining, pool hasn't flooded yet, house doesn't appear to have sprung a leak.

But the people at work are frickin' morons. So, background: after the first major hurricane that blew through our area in 2004, they grouped people into teams based on where they live. After a storm, the team captain is supposed to call everyone to check that they're OK. Equally, we can call the team captain if we need help, and the team captain will try to do something for us (I think they get given some amount of petty cash prior to us closing the office). Or something. Nice in theory, and in the other two storms I got a call after the storms, was asked if I was OK and needed any assistance, said I was fine, caught up a bit on gossip of who had suffered damage. Everything was peachy. We also have a special 1-800 number from my employer to call into where they leave recorded emergency announcements.

Except this time we have a new office manager lady who is very keen but new to the area so she doesn't really know what she's doing. For one thing, I don't think she's quite grasped the team concept, that it's supposed to be people who live close to one another so there's a chance of physically reaching someone who needs help, even if the roads are hard to get through due to fallen trees. However, she didn't check the map when she assigned this year's teams. In other words, a person who lives 3 streets away from me (but in a different city) is not in my team this year. But then again, my team captain lives 4 streets further away from me, in that city and not in mine.  So that doesn't make much sense.  

They closed the office early and she told everyone to check the 1-800 number at 6.30am for information about which offices were going to be open or not. Well, obviously, you can't have 500+ people across the state calling a single 1-800 number at the same time, so she would have been much better telling people to call after 6.30. But I assumed people were sensible enough to figure that out for themselves. Besides, sometimes my employer doesn't update the message at exactly the time they had planned to.  

Anyhoo, the higherups had a telephone conference scheduled for 8.30pm, at which time the office manager confidently told me that they'd make a decision on office closings.  Uh, no they won't, I thought, because they won't have enough information yet.  They'll only make that decision in the morning, at 6am before posting the emergency message. What happens? My team captain calls at 9.30pm to tell me they hadn't made a decision and to call the 1-800 number at 6.30am. Riiight, says I, so we're at exactly the same situation we were in last time instructions were given out so why did you need to call? "I know" she says "but I was told I had to call you".  Dumb.

This morning at 3am after the storm work me up and I looked at the storm track/amount of rainfall going on I figured that there was no way they were going to open the office this morning because the state would be advising people to stay off the roads. I turned my alarm off and went back to bed (I have a secondary alarm that goes off at 7.30 that I figured I'd use to drag myself up and call the 1-800 number). And then I figured I'd probably loll in bed some more for half the morning. What happens? The phone goes at 7am, it's my team captain calling, waking me from a deep slumber and telling me that they couldn't get the message on the emergency system for some reason so everyone's been calling since 6.30 and not getting through.  So she was told to call and tell me that there was no message but to stay put until 10am and call then to check if the office was going to open this afternoon.  Aaarrrgh.  I fucking knew that already, and she had to call to wake me up??? Srsly?

Bet ya can't tell I get grumpy when I am woken up...