Everyone Knows It's Windy

So, where I live, we sometimes have windy days. So windy, in fact, that I think I can truly understand that passage in James Herriot's books. In Yorkshire, he said, they have what's called 'thin wind' or a 'lazy wind', so called because it can't be bothered to blow around you, but instead just blows straight through you. Cold weather here is ten times worse when the wind is fierce, let me tell you.

One day at work, it was incredibly windy. I was standing behind the counter as usual, watching the outside world. The sign for the new building next to Taco Bell clearly didn't seem that sturdy, because it was swaying back and forth in the wind. The wind whistled and wailed, screamed and shrilled. Giant tumbleweeds rolled past. At one point, a cow flew by. (Okay, not really.)

The wind also made opening and closing the doors really fun. It was either pushing doors shut, or throwing them open with great violence. I tried to make sure they were fully shut so the wind wouldn't do this, but it didn't always work.

After a while, one door finally had enough. It was flung wide open by the wind when someone opened it... and then I heard a SNAP. After that, it wouldn't shut all the way. So it was just going back and forth in the wind for a while. One of my co-workers tried putting a heavy box down to hold the door in place so it wouldn't swing so much, but the wind had so much power that the door just dragged the box across the pavement.

Also, whether by coincidence, or the wind having powers beyond human comprehension, one of the kiosks for customers to place orders... just started messing up. It was glitching out, the screen flickering and doing bizarre things. Because apparently the neighboring business having a sign violently swinging back and forth, and the door closer being so busted you couldn't shut the door any more, just wasn't enough.

The maintenance guy was called about the door and eventually came, and he finagled the door opener for a while without much luck. Finally, he undid it from the door, and only then would the door shut. He could not fix that door opener. When I got off work, he was in the process of putting a new one on.

We had a wind advisory that day for some reason. I can't imagine why, the weather was so mild.