2774 Driveway shock

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Mart Gross, biologist, on what behaviors get noted
or discounted : "Theory determines what you see."

That's so true. We tend to see what we expect to see,
and discount or explain away anything unexpected.
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All the weather sites and TV news I checked on Tuesday said we'd get 6 to 12 inches of snow yesterday (of course they didn't agree), so Tuesday afternoon I called Plow Guy and left a message that I'd need his services if we got 4 inches or more. At return from dinner Tuesday night, I left the car at the foot of the driveway so I could get out easily if we had a lot of snow. I figured I'd call Plow Guy and tell him to warn me before he arrived so I could move the car out of the driveway so he could get in.

The storm did shift southeast. The blizzard never arrived. When I went to bed last night, there were only 3 inches out there, so I didn't call Plow Guy.

Shock. I looked out the door this morning, and the driveway has been plowed.

How?!

At the foot, my driveway is one car wide. There's a steep uphill bank on the south side. On the north side, there's the mailbox on a small flat area, and then another downhill bank. This photo is from the ice storm last year, when I lost a bunch of trees. You can see the bank on the right and the mailbox on the left. Since the driveway is heading up, between the mailbox and the drive you can see a slope, and to the left of the mailbox the lawn rapidly gets steep enough to quickly get unmowable. My car is parked right there where the trees had fallen.
Now, how did Plow Guy, with his huge truck, get onto the driveway to plow it? Is my car still parked down there? (It was locked, so he didn't push it out of the way.) Is the mailbox still there? Did he chew up my lawn climbing the bank in the middle of the night?

And since we got only 3 inches total, why did he plow anyway? It's not insignificant. It's $55 per plowing.

I can't see the car from the house. It's below the brow of the hill.
I'll be going out after noon. Update and possible photos then.
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