Backstory: A friend of mine has been dealing with a longstanding personal problem (let's call him C) and often goes to me and our other friend (let's call him J) for our perspectives and our advice. Recently C has fallen into sort of a slump and has been talking to us more often, but usually not together.
J hits me up on FB chat and asks if I've talked to C recently, and then suggests that when he comes over on the weekend if I know any good places for us to go night sightseeing to help J get his mind off the things that are bothering him.
My response: "You know that Friday night is supposed to be the rainiest night of the entire weekend, right?"
To which J says, "Oh, I had no idea."
This is a more minor example, but I'm finding with my group of friends, I'm usually the only one who makes what I would consider "normal preparations" for my own planning purposes. For example, I check the weather report every morning to help me figure out what I'm going to wear that day. That, I think, most people would consider fairly normal.
But I take it a step further. If I'm planning something in advance, say meeting up with friends on the weekend, I'll look up on the Department of Transportation's website to see if there are any travel advisories, or construction planned along the path I'm supposed to go on and plan my leave time accordingly. Or I'll check it before I head out just to see how traffic is on the way to the place I'm going. Or, if there's supposed to be a game for one of our professional teams (Sounders or Seahawks), I'll check if they have a game the day that I'm planning something to see when traffic will be the worst and plan around it.
I do this because leaving in bad traffic in Seattle can mean the difference between getting somewhere in 20 minutes and getting there in 1.5 hours. I used to live a significant distance away from the majority of my friends (average 30-45 minute drive to go see people) so doing things like that became integrated into my daily routine, and I just haven't stopped doing it since moving closer to the city.
That being said, my friends who have recently moved into the city are -still- regularly surprised when traffic is bad, or when travel plans don't go off as expected. A friend of mine regularly complains that traffic is bad and that it took him 40 minutes to get to my place and I suggest every time for him to check traffic reports to see if the bridge (that allows him to get here faster) is closed or if an alternate route is suggested, but he never does.
This has led me to ask the question, am I just obsessed with being overprepared for travel times, or are my friends the ones who are underprepared? I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is a bit of both, but I also have a feeling that this is why 9 times out of 10 if the group of us want to go somewhere, I'm the one who volunteers to drive.
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http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/829/07kyloforce.png - Thanks Diyosa!
If I had to guess, I'd say 5% of people check the weather each morning. I think that alone is being pretty prepared. I don't want to say "overprepared" because that makes it sound like you have an addiction or something is wrong, which isn't what I think at all. I think you're just taking time to be smart, and other people (who I'm also not going to call underprepared) don't seem to care as much.
My weather checking goes along with the direness of the weather. In Canada, I would make a point of checking doineedajacket.com because that was conceivably a life-or-death thing because of the lake effect. Though when I joined the smart phone havers and there began to be a widget I got a bit better about checking it before leaving.
My newest adventure in preparedness involves the bus that theoretically cuts 10-20 minutes off my commute. A quick check of that when I head out the door lets me know whether it would be worth my time to grab that bus, but it's hard to remember to do it, because I'm running out the door.
On a completely unrelated level of preparedness, I keep a spare jacket at my office. This both allows me to not wear a jacket in the morning when it is not raining but will be raining in the afternoon, and also to wear a jacket to the office in the morning when it will be cold at first but warm later. Also I can change jackets if it suits me.
Get it. Jacket? Suits?
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
That jacket thing is pretty great. I have an extra umbrella I keep in the office for when I forget mine in the car or if it's not raining / not raining hard enough to use one in the morning. But a spare jacket at work seems like a great idea.
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v129/ukealii50/kylo.jpg - Thanks uke!
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/829/07kyloforce.png - Thanks Diyosa!