I try and avoid these, because they’re insanely geektastic.
Nonetheless: a bunch of whining has gone on lately about failures on the trains, in the coldest and iciest week of the last 15 years. For most of today, the M1 was closed, for almost exactly the same reasons. Anyone who slates the former and not the latter is an ignorant moron.
Things break in this country [= England + lowland Scotland] when it’s terrifyingly cold, because it’s very seldom terrifyingly cold, so it’d be stupid to build them to deal with terrifying cold. These things include cars, trains, school boilers, and generally everything non-life-critical.
We can’t defeat the weather, no matter how hard we try. So chill out (haha), and if you live somewhere insanely remote then light a fire, climb into a warm bed, and deal with the fact that you can’t get into the office by car nor train (oh no! disaster! surely you’ll die!)
Update: Andrew Gilligan, the unthinking man’s ignorant moron, thoroughly jumps on the bandwagon.
I'll never forget when our road-and-air based postal service was brought to a halt, just in time for the christmas rush, by the Wrong Type Of Fog. Not that it was described that way in the news, of course.
And a search of "lorry overturned" on Google News is worthwhile. I might come over all TYR and do some exciting visualisation feed of it sometime.
I've discovered why southerners whine so much about the weather, anyway; it's because London seems to make the cold colder. Partly this is because all the buildings are made of shit, rather than either proper industrial technochems or big lumps of stone. But it's also the socio-psychic factor.