Snow reboot: Let’s try this again, but normalcy will take time

Now, whether we loved every minute of our extended snow holiday or were chafing by last Tuesday to get back to the office — and, more urgently, to get the kids back in school — we might find that reality arrives with a thud.

“I think it’s going to be a tough week for everyone,” said Futris, who spent most of last week at home with his increasingly restless sons, ages 6 and 9.

It won’t help that many will find a backlog of unanswered e-mails or unfilled orders or untaught lesson plans staring them in the face.

“January and February are when we really get down to teaching,” said Marcia Mayo, a teacher at Morris Brandon Elementary in Atlanta. “But we’ve only had three teaching days since Christmas. We lost a week.”

At least, as a second-grade teacher, she’s not faced with making up the time lost in preparing her students for the CRCT. “I know the third- through fifth-grade teachers are somewhat panicked,” she said.

At 60, she’s been around too long to expect her students to show up with reading, writing and ’rithmetic uppermost in their minds.

“I’m sure we’ll spend much of the day just talking about the snow,” she said.

Adults returning to work may also find it difficult to settle to the task at hand.

“This week will be a real challenge,” Futris said. “Trying to get back into the rhythm is kind of hard.”

Any kind of interruption, even the transient kind so ubiquitous in a wired workplace, takes a toll on concentration, researchers have found. If a 60-second interruption can cause an eight minute loss of productivity, as documented by researchers at Central Washington University, what will a weeklong interruption do?

Entrepreneurs and workers paid by the hour, who don’t get paid if they don’t work, face more than psychological challenges in recouping what they lost.

“We were already behind because of Christmas, and this has just been bad timing. My husband is a plumber and has several jobs in wait [but he] just couldn’t even get out of our driveway to start any of them,” an ajc.com reader wrote last week in response to a blog item.

“It’s been beautiful to look at and I have enjoyed sharing it with my son — but as I said, this week will cause us a month of bad weeks,” wrote the woman, who posted under the name Carla.

John Lawson, an online marketer and e-commerce consultant who is originally from Ohio, said he watched in amazement as people stripped the grocery store shelves of milk, bread and water in advance of the storm, which hardly sounded like a big deal to him.

“I thought, ‘Are these people really nuts?’ ” he said.

Two inches of solid ice changed his mind. “It was an interesting week, a very interesting week,” he said.

On Thursday, he said, the postal service did manage to get a truck to his home near Stone Mountain (although the FedEx truck got stuck on the ice), and by Monday all his outgoing shipments had been picked up. But he still hadn’t received some incoming parcels.

“I figure they’ll be back on track within three days,” he said.

Now, he said, he’s “50-50,” torn between relief and regret that life is returning to normal. “I did enjoy it; I’ve never seen such pristine snow. But I’ve never had cabin fever like this.”

That’s one of the curious things about the human animal, psychologists have noted: We crave both predictability and novelty. Give us of enough of one, and we’re apt to yearn for the other. So even those who spent the last few days counting the minutes until they could settle back into familiar routines may experience at least a momentary sense of letdown.

“There’s that realization: ‘I really do have to get some work done.’ ” Futris said.

Those with children face the added challenge of balancing the demands of catching up at work with the need to give the kids the attention and structure they need, he said.

To smooth the transition, he advised parents to communicate with each other clearly about what each partner needs and to be very deliberate about re-establishing kids’ routines and letting them know what to expect.

That, and don’t expect everyone to adjust instantly. A certain pushing of limits is only to be expected under the circumstances, he said. “It may take some time.”

Even adults may feel twinges of rebellion as the walls of life-as-usual close in — just as Mayo and her teacher colleagues experienced an upsurge of joy at the first announcement that school would be canceled last week.

“We finally heard the good news around 9 p.m.,” she wrote on her blog, “The raucous rejoicing could be heard all over greater Atlanta, some of which actually emanated from the kids.”

Today, though, she said, after a week of sitting at home, “I’m excited. I’m ready to go back.”

Lawson, too, is equally glad that the snow came and that it’s finally gone — leaving only memories.

“I’m sure this is one of those events we’ll be talking about forever,” he said. “And that’s cool.”