The school's robocall came at 6:12am. I'd already texted my study group at 11pm the night before to say don't bother setting an alarm.
I want to be clear about something before I get into this: I am not a weather person. I do not own a barometer. Until this January, my entire forecasting method was “look out the window and regret my choices.” That changed on a Tuesday night when I was three hours into a study session for a class I was, frankly, behind in.
Someone in our group chat sent a screenshot of WeatherPerch’s hourly breakdown for our part of Chicago — a wall of snow icons starting at 2am and not letting up until well past sunrise, with accumulation numbers that made the whole chat go quiet for a second. I checked it myself, mostly out of disbelief. Same story. Steady snow, sustained wind, the kind of overnight totals that don’t leave much room for interpretation.
At 11pm I sent the most confident text of my semester: “don’t set an alarm, we’re not going in.” My study partner, a professional skeptic, replied with three question marks and nothing else.
At 6:12am, the school’s emergency alert system caught up with what four of us already knew and had, frankly, already gone back to sleep knowing. Campus closed. Classes cancelled. My skeptical study partner texted back a single word: “how.”
How is that I wasn’t guessing. I’d watched the hourly totals climb overnight, checked the “Updated just now” timestamp before bed like it was a sports score, and made a call based on actual numbers instead of vibes and a Facebook group full of people arguing about whether “a dusting” counts as anything. It felt less like predicting the weather and more like being handed the answer key a few hours early.
The genuinely funny part is that this has now happened three more times this winter, and every time, my group chat’s response has shifted from “how did you know” to just forwarding me their own screenshots before I even open the app. I’ve become, against all odds and prior life experience, the designated weather guy. I did not apply for this job. I’m keeping it anyway.
If you’ve got a group chat that still relies on someone’s cousin’s aching knee for storm forecasting, do them a favor and send this along — or just show them the app. Somebody’s got to be the one who knows before the robocall does, and it might as well be you. If you want the actual mechanics of how a snow day gets called in the first place, that’s covered elsewhere.