Remember how life used to pause when the snow began to fall? When snow meant you stayed home and didn't do the kind of work you do at work? Remember life before modems?

Yesterday, Marge Jozsa started her most excellent snow day at home with a 4:45 a.m. phone call. As executive director of University Care at Open Gates, the health care clinic of the University of Maryland School of Nursing, she needed to review the day's game plan with one of her staff members.

She waited until 6:30 a.m. before making her next phone calls. After a flurry of e-mails, she tackled a statistical report, then gave an assistant at the clinic instructions about how to answer the phones.

Along the way, breakfast never happened.

By 9 a.m., Jozsa was "plodding" through the rest of her briefcase: the staffing schedule for the next three months, the wording of a grant that would benefit women with HIV who used the Pigtown clinic.

The only thing different about this workday, she decided as she slaved away at the desk near the kitchen, was that she was wearing blue jeans instead of heels and a skirt. And her hair was in a ponytail.

That, and her boys: One teen-ager rolled out of bed about 10:30 a.m., the other appeared at 11:15 a.m. By that time, Jozsa had already put in nearly seven hours of work.

Her husband, meanwhile, was downstairs toiling away in his office. Dan Sheridan, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, faced a slew of student papers and e-mails. Luckily, their household had four computers, two phone lines and a fax.

The family moved to Baltimore from Portland, Ore., about a year ago. This was their first snow day in 13 years.

What was a snow day like back in 1989?

Jozsa thought a minute. Her boys were ages 2 and 4, but she sure didn't spend the day building snowmen.

"I was director of a battered women's shelter," she recalled. "I'm sure I was working at home, it just wasn't so high-tech. And I'm sure I wasn't up at quarter to 5."

On Tuesday afternoon, Jennifer Green was alarmed by Internet maps of the approaching snowstorm. Director of high school reform for the nonprofit Fund for Educational Excellence, Green had planned an important conference here for the next day. The fund, which raises money to aid the Baltimore public schools, was trying to select an evaluator for one of its projects, and Dec. 5 was the one time everyone was free for interviews.

It had taken a month to schedule a subcommittee of eight to interview three groups of four to six people each. Folks were coming to Baltimore from Virginia, the Washington suburbs, even Boston.

As the weather reports turned grimmer, Green and her assistant, Christine Higgins, became more determined.

Reschedule? You've got to be kidding.

At 6 a.m. yesterday, as snow piled up outside her Annapolis home, Green and a colleague called 16 people to confirm that the meeting and interviews would still take place - over the phone.

At 9:30 a.m., the subcommittee of teleconferencers reviewed their interviewing strategies and went over the ground rules. (Among them: After each set of interviews, every one would put down the phone for a five-minute bathroom break. )

At 9:45 a.m., the first group of six applicants called in for their interviews. At 10:45, the next group called. The final group called at 11:45 a.m. There was ample debriefing after each session.

By the time everything wrapped up about 1:30 p.m., the subcommittee had been together on the telephone for four hours straight. Only one was actually working from her "office" office.

What was it like coordinating such a complex teleconference from home?

"You could hear every sneeze, every cough on the telephone," Green recalled. "Once, my 9-month-old daughter Madeleine started crying in the background. My husband did a wonderful job at keeping her entertained. But a couple of times he did come upstairs to say, 'Aren't you through yet?!'"

In this high-tech tale, Jan Rivitz gets the part of the old-fashioned girl. The executive director of the Aaron Straus & Lillie Straus Foundation spent her snow day at home, catching up on some reading.

But you could hardly call it reading for pleasure.

Rivitz, whose foundation supports families and children in Baltimore, faced three large stacks of paper: One was 16 inches high, the other two measured a foot each.

The first step of her workday was to organize the piles. One held annual reports from other foundations, another contained a four-part series on leadership as well as the Maryland Nonprofit Employment Study. There were at least 15 back issues of The Chronicle of Philanthropy and numerous research papers with such titles as "The Young, the Restless and the Jobless."

But was she complaining?

"Everything's good about this day," Rivitz said. "I have all the excitement that I used to have as a kid on a snow day. I can stay home and work anytime, but the snow legitimizes it. I have that excitement of having the snow pile up outside. I'm making vegetable soup. The phone isn't ringing. And I can listen to music - Jack Johnson is the big, hot ticket on the West Coast where my son lives, and I feel very hip."

Rivitz spent the day working by herself. Her husband? Of course he went into the office, she said; he grew up in Cleveland.

"Larry likes to say that if they closed the schools in Cleveland as much as they do in Baltimore, he'd still be in the third grade."