I seem to remember many years ago, when some employers were not quite as bothered/aware of the problems that some winter weather could bring, and we would see the snow building up on a wall (mainly closed off area of operations unit due to the work we did), and nothing was being said by management, then anyone listening to the radio could of all the big local firms sending people home early and we could hear that the local buses were being withdrawn from service - but still we would lose time/money if we thought it was "time to go" - still the roads were a lot quieter when we finally got the nod to leave, even although most of the roads were probably not ploughed and gritted as that costs money! Then we moved onto flexi time - as long as work load allowed it, we could disappear but would need to make the time up later, fair enough, and there was a generous set of conditions that allowed you to fight through snow/ice and stay for maybe 3 hours and get credited with core hours - so as you might expect, most if not all the people that lived locally and who were not involved with needing to travel "out of town" caught onto this scam and came in for 3 hours all dressed up to spend most of the rest of the day partying and getting paid. Ah well, as my company (under one of its many owners) said, "we employ you to work locally - it is up to you where you chose to live" - which is fair enough, but when really local house prices do not work out very well on average wages, where did they think their employees lived? Funny old world.