Some people get ''Kroger anxiety'' attacks and rush out in roaring blizzards to heap shopping carts with bread and milk. Some get suicidal and aim their cars at the nearest ditch. But I'm a veteran of the snow wars in Michigan. I get TCFS - Traumatic Cabin Fever Syndrome.
It only takes a few flakes to trigger flashbacks. While everyone else woke up Wednesday morning in Cincinnati, Alaska, I woke up back in Michigan, snowbound with Fleetwood Mac and the Rockford Files.
While everyone else was wondering how many salt trucks Cincinnati could get for a $400 million stadium, I was dreaming of driving a snowplow again, sending weightless waterfalls cascading over parked cars.
While everyone else was listening to the endless lists of ''closings'' and ''delays'' to find out if life was temporarily suspended, I was a kid again, sledding down an empty four-lane road with nothing but the song of wind in bare trees for background music.
Up in Northern Michigan, where real men have more fingers than teeth, they have a name for storms like the one that hit Cincinnati. They call it summer. And when a really big avalanche falls out of the sky and stops the world, they know enough to stop with it.
Cincinnati hasn't got the hang of that, yet.
On my way to work Thursday morning, I stopped counting after seven abandoned cars. Some were spinouts, but several were left there by people who recklessly assumed they could drive 15 miles to work with less than a full tank of gas.
Some were even Sport Utility Vehicles, with cell phones, heated seats, four-wheel-drive and - get this - ''climate control.'' Rain? Turn on the wipers. Snow? Turn on the defroster. Global warming? Adjust the climate control.
And we laugh at the passengers who believed the Titanic was ''unsinkable.'' There's a lesson here somewhere.
I am probably the last human who has not seen the new Titanic yet. But I have noticed that the computer-generated 1998 version cost 26 times more than the real ship that was built in 1912. And it still sinks.
If $200 million worth of our most sophisticated computers can't keep an imaginary Titanic afloat, I guess it should come as no surprise that our best modern weather computers can't do any better than the sailor in the crow's nest who didn't see any icebergs until they crashed on deck in 1912.
Weather Service officials said three computer models predicted ''flurries.'' Only one predicted any snow, and that one said it would miss Cincinnati. (Has anyone counted the lifeboats on those computers?)
If the Titanic is the symbol of foolhardy faith in technology for 1912, the name for it in 1998 is ''Doppler.''
I can handle ''white death'' in Cincinnati, ''black ice'' in Arizona and ''lake effect'' in Michigan. But what do you call the uneasy feeling that our computer-enhanced reality is a Titanic folly?
There's this Y2K thing. The other day the FAA warned that the nation's air-traffic control system will crash on Jan. 1, 2000, because the geniuses who designed computers didn't notice that 1999 is followed by a year with lots of zeros.
There's that ARTIMIS thing - those expensive highway signs, linked to cameras and computers, that are usually blank unless they say, ''ThIs mEsSAge is oNliE a tiSt.'' (I wonder how many salt trucks we could get for one of those?)
There's that weather forecasting thing. I like meteorologists because they are wrong so often they make editorialists look semi-accurate. But since they stopped looking out the window and started leaning on computers, they are nearly as hard to believe as our Molester in Chief, President Clinton.
And we've all heard scary tales of computer catastrophes. ''My hard drive crashed.'' ''It ate my files.'' ''My child was kidnapped by 3-D/IBM-Compatible Darth Vader.'' ''My wife left me for the Internet.''
The other day, my PC (padded cell) crashed, and I spent four hours searching the smoking crater for a black box that would tell me what happened.
I never found it. Maybe it's a symptom of Traumatic Cabin Fever Syndrome, but I think it went down with the computer-enhanced Titanic.
As far as I'm concerned, it can rust at the bottom of the silicon sea, until Bill Gates invents a Microsoft Snow Shoveler.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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