It's raining pretty hard today and I had to walk quite a distance downtown to apply for my passport. As I was crossing the last street to enter the building, I saw a puddle of water next to the curb and was reminded of an event during my visit to New York:
The weekend before I arrived in New York, there was a large snow storm. By the time I arrived, the snow had stopped falling for a few days but the temperature had not risen. So for the majority of my week-long visit, there were piles of dirty, crusty snow on every corner. The last day or two of my visit, the temperature finally raised past freezing and the snow piles melted into a slushy mess.
On one of these days, I approached a street corner and there were two ladies nearby acting kind of frantic. There were other people around, and the two ladies were saying "Get Back!", "Back up!" to everyone. I had no idea what there problem was, but I figured they must know something I didn't, so I backed up along with the rest of the crowd. A few seconds passed, then a car rushed by us and hit a huge slushy puddle that was right off the curb. The wall of icy water that splashed up was enormous, far larger than I would have imagined, had I been aware of the impending watery doom. And I would have been entirely drenched with dirty freezing water had I not been warned...
So, thank you ladies. Had I been in your shoes, I would have probably let me stand there and get soaked. It's a good thing for the world that we aren't all sadistic bastards like me.
