Barometric Pressure Drop Blamed For Everything That Goes Wrong On Tuesday

An office worker has attributed every negative event of her Tuesday — including a headache, heavy traffic, a paper jam, a lukewarm coffee, and a pervasive sense of existential unease — to a barometric pressure drop of 0.15 inches of mercury. Sandra Millibar, 38, an accounts manager who monitors barometric pressure via an app on her phone, arrived at work on Tuesday announcing that "the barometer is falling" with the gravity of a ship captain spotting an approaching squall. "I woke up with a headache," Millibar reported. "Barometric pressure. The traffic was terrible on I-94 — barometric pressure makes people drive worse. The printer jammed three times — the paper absorbs moisture when the pressure drops. My coffee was cold by the time I got to my desk — actually that might be unrelated. No, it's related. Low pressure slows molecular motion. That's a fact I'm willing to stand behind." Millibar's coworkers have grown accustomed to her atmospheric interpretations of workplace events. During a previous low-pressure system, she attributed a missed deadline to "frontal passage cognitive disruption" and a disagreement with a colleague to "pre-frontal irritability, well-documented in the literature." The literature she references is a 1981 study on weather sensitivity that has been cited primarily by people who already believed the conclusion. "The pressure dropped 0.15 inches," noted her colleague, meteorology enthusiast Richard Tropopause. "That's the equivalent of ascending about 150 feet in elevation. She experiences a greater pressure change taking the elevator to the fourth floor. She does not blame the elevator for her headaches." Millibar has rejected this comparison on the grounds that elevator pressure changes are "voluntary and therefore metabolically different." By Wednesday, the pressure had risen 0.08 inches. Millibar reported feeling "noticeably better," a recovery she attributes entirely to the mercury and not to the fact that it was no longer Tuesday.