I was a freshman at the University of Georgia (near Atlanta) AND a customer service manager for regional supermarket chain Harris Teeter. I'd also only been living at the apartment I was in for a few weeks, and with three roommates I'd never known before but were put in contact with through mutual friends; that meant we all got along pretty well because we hadn't gotten "Real World 'real' " yet.
That's a blog for another day; this is all about how the infamous "blizzard of 1993" affected me.
March 13, 1993 was a Saturday, and me being the low man on the totem pole at work, I was scheduled to open the store that morning at 6am. I knew the forecast of course, but remember, we didn't have mobile phones with internet access ... or internet access PERIOD, really. There'd be no radar-watching or up-to-the-minute reports coming in quickly on a mobile device. So I got up and drove in to work on an unusually cold and gray mid-March day in time to open the store and get a couple of cash registers ready for business.
It wasn't an hour into store opening when the flakes started coming down FURIOUSLY, and panic-stricken customers would start coming into the store in droves for the usual - bread & milk, of course - along with canned goods and whatnot. We closed by noon because no one else was going to be able to make it in, and in that small six-hour window, we had the third-busiest day for that Harris Teeter location ever. In just six hours.
There were no cashiers that made it in, that day, either; just me, the assistant store manager and the meat manager, who thankfully had some cashier experience himself. Cold as it was, we worked up a sweat!
Once I'd done all the store accounting for that short day, I hopped in my 1984 Nissan 200SX sports car to get home. "Home" was usually a ten-minute drive but I took 45 to get there. One of my roommates - Don - the happy-go-lucky "whoa dude!" guy, informed me some girls at the neighboring apartment complex had lots of beer and had commandeered their community's outdoor hot tub, so off we went, dressed for the blizzard hike but with backpacks of suitcases and towels.
And we partied in that hot tub for hours ... til our fingers were pruning. Suffice to say, the next day, that was the worst. hangover. ever. Dehydrating ourselves from the outside and from within. Brilliant.
Oh, and then there's the point where the party was ending and we realized we had to get OUT of that hot tub and bolt to the clubhouse to dry off and dress for the hike back to our apartment. We were idiots.
Cold. Wet. Idiots.
Everything's kinda fuzzy from there, but that's my "blizzard of '93" story - as best as I can remember it.
Wait, no I do remember the next day one of my other roomates - Jeff- was a big Atlanta Hawks fan and had shelled out big dollars to go see the Hawks play the Lakers in Atlanta the next day. It was about a 60 mile trip and TREACHEROUS that next day, but (did I mention we were idiots?) we went, anyhow.
The announced attendance that day was 13,628. If there were 3,628 there I'd be shocked. Hawks won, though, so there's that. We almost got booted from the Omni arena that day, too; turns out we were standing and cheering for the Hawks loudly and making life difficult for the row behind us.
I guess their blizzard hangover was worse than ours.