Let It Snow 🙂

My wife tells me I’m sick and twisted:  I love snow.  She, however, doesn’t care for snow at all, which is a pity, since we’re getting it right now.  Well, actually, I should use the past tense, it’s just about over at the moment.  We were expecting to get 6″ – 10″, though I’m hoping for a foot.  Looking outside, looks like we probably got about 6″.  Well, half-way there – it’s supposed to snow again this weekend, and possibly next week, and the temperatures aren’t going to rise above freezing until after that, so it’s going to be a nice, cumulative event. 🙂

But, I’m not actually here to talk about the snow.  Instead, I’m posting about some amusement over the various things I saw posted on Facebook about the snow.  Social media often ends up being this cool little view into people’s minds 🙂  I’ve got about 2,500 friends on Facebook, around 300 of which I actually see posts from (yes, I have a lot of people who’s posts I don’t actively see in my timeline – it would be impossible for me to keep up!  Heck, some days I can’t keep up with the people I have on my list…)

Originally, it was supposed to start snowing around 9 PM yesterday.  That’s what the weather guys had predicted three days ago.  As it got closer, the timeframe slowly moved to Midnight, then, 3 AM, then after sunrise.

But, people don’t keep up with that sort of information it seems.  I woke up, looked outside, and there was just a very light dusting of snow as the sun began to rise.  That’s when people started posting that there wasn’t any snow, and sort of making fun of the weather guys, and some even saying we weren’t really going to get any.  Which is funny – I have multiple weather apps on my phone, and there’s quite a few websites you can pull up the radar on.  Instead of looking at information and seeing what’s going on, people just start talking without looking.  Which, of course, is really common on social networks – otherwise, if people actually looked at things and thought about them, we wouldn’t have a need for Snopes (seriously, Facebook should build a button, right beside “Like” and “Share” called “Snopes”, which when pressed, would automatically query Snopes for a subject, and post the result with the click of a button.  That, or, someone could just write a plugin for Chrome.  Hmmmmm…)

It wasn’t long after sunrise that the snow began in earnest.  And it was wonderful.

Well, for me anyways.  It might have been around 2 PM when I saw the first complaint that it needed to quit snowing.  From someone who was making the fun of the fact it wasn’t snowing at 5 AM.  As the day moved on – and the snow began to pile up – I kept seeing posts from people complaining about the snow.  See, people aren’t really happy with the day unless they are complaining about something on Facebook these days.  It didn’t matter if it’s stubbing their toe, President Obama addressing the nation, or the weather.  People complain a lot in real life, and Facebook is an amazing amplifier for complaints.

Then, I see things like people posting radar images, or images from the live feeds of the traffic cameras.  I’d see that they re-posted it 5-minutes ago, even though it was 5-hour old information.  Which, well, in a snow-storm really negates the usefulness of the information entirely.  There’s some things that are timeless information. There are somethings that time can just go ahead and slip away from, and it’s OK.  Then, well, there’s some things you should probably look at the timestamp on.

Then, there were a couple of people who did the “wow, I haven’t seen this much snow in Wichita in years!”  Except, well, last year in February we got 21″ of snow in the span of 4 days.  Facebook brings out the best in our short-term memory 😉

I’m not complaining about the snow on Facebook, of course – I like snow.  But, I thought my blog was a great place to complain about Facebook instead 😉  (I’m really not complaining – I find it amusing, to be honest.)