It’s simply miserable in San Francisco today.

It’s cold and rainy and the type of weather that most anywhere except this good-weather-forsaken vortex known as the Bay Area would bring thoughts and hopes of overnight snow to salvage the otherwise dismal atmosphere. The utter impossibility of snow, the hopelessness to even thinking about snow, is perhaps the greatest curse among many weather hexes in this region.

I made the mistake of going out to lunch, instead of just holing up with my cereal in the office and hoping to not get too hungry. I had to amend my course from Chipotle (crazily optimistic, being about a half-mile away) to Herbert’s Mexican Grill, a far cry in quality at a third the distance. I wound up with under-cheesed nachos on a noticeably sticky tray.

Shortly after starting to eat and read, a series of women sat down at the table adjacent mine. They were all casually dressed but had this remarkably similar look to them, a quality almost that was hard to exactly typify. Upon a little listening to their conversation, it became clear that they were flight attendants, apparently on a brief tourist stopover in San Francisco – long enough to change out of the uniforms and get up to the cable cars.

And then they started talking about January 16, 2009.

“I was on a LaGuardia to Denver the day after, scheduled on an A320. The day after, you know. And everyone on it just kept going on sick list. And they’d refill the flight and then all the new people would go on sick list. I had a friend who offered to vouch for me and put me up if I wanted to too. She said she had a hotel room for a week and everything.”

Prepare doors.