Lessons of last year lead to practiced panic.

Kourtney Pennycook pointed her smartphone at the packed Kroger parking lot on Monroe Drive early Wednesday afternoon and began snapping photos. The recent transplant from Michigan was trying to sum up the controlled chaos for the folks back home via a sweeping panoramic shot, but she wasn’t holding out much hope of success.

“It’s not an easy thing to capture,” the SCAD student admitted with a resigned sigh.

That’s because what looked like one thing on the surface — people frantically jockeying for parking spots and lugging cases of bottled water to their cars ahead of this year’s latest, scariest-yet winter storm threat — was really just symptomatic of something deeper at work in the collective psyche of metro Atlanta: Practiced Panic. “Everyone’s taking it seriously because of what happened last year,” explained Kyle Bond, speaking not in his official capacity as a CDC employee, but rather as someone who got an unexpected day off when the CDC made the proactive decision to be closed Wednesday. He’d decided to treat it like a Saturday and was shopping for remodeling supplies at the Lindbergh Home Depot. “It’s sort of a controlled overreacting.”

Can you blame Atlanta? After all, everyone here either got stuck in their car for hours on the icy interstates during last year’s Snowpocalypse or knows someone else who did. Even being from out-of-town doesn’t necessarily make you immune.

“I think the idea of having a snow day when there’s no snow on the ground is kind of funny,” said Linda Burlak, a science teacher who’s here on a field trip with a group of students from the Buxton School in (ahem, snowy) Massachusetts. “But what happened last year seems to have everyone spooked. And we met with one Ice and snow coat a tree along Interstate 575 near Canton on Wednesday. Severe weather slowed much of Georgia on Wednesday. guy who spent 10 hours stuck on the road, so I guess you can’t really blame them.”

So now we overprepare and overreact. So sue us if we’re still scarred from having to sleep in our cars and becoming the butt of Jon Stewart jokes. That seemed to be the general reaction around the metro area Wednesday when we woke up to find no snow on the ground — still — and a never-ending supply of closing and cancellation notices scrolling across our TV screens.

In Cumming, Bud L. Ellis had bought a new batch of flashlights two days ago. Bread and milk? Done and done.

Ellis has been tracking this storm since last week, and he doesn’t just rely on Atlanta’s professional meteorologists for his information. He follows not one, but two storm-tracking models and, based on their projections, he expects to be snowed in this morning.

“I can get some ribbing from people at work and my family; but when the big storms come, the jokes stop,” he said.

Indeed, if we’re not exactly happy about this whole Practiced Panic thing by now, we’re at least getting pretty used to it.

Every metro area public school system was closed Wednesday, along with many government and private offices; even those businesses that opened their doors at the beginning of the day began sending their employees home well before 2 p.m., when an official state of emergency took effect in 50 North Georgia counties. (Gov. Nathan Deal had made the announcement hours earlier, on Tuesday.)

At 360i, a digital marketing company in Atlanta, Jenna Barone left work around 2: 30 p.m. and said some of her co-workers who live in the northern suburbs had telecommuted rather than risk a repeat of last year’s unintentional interstate slumber party. Even Barone, who lives in Grant Park, wasn’t taking any chances. Rather than drive to work as usual on Wednesday, she’d taken MARTA.

For those who did drive, evening rush hour still happened. Just not in the evening.

Nate Cross is a driver for a shuttle service that ferries workers from their offices to where they park. He normally works from 4:30 to 8 p.m., but on Wednesday, those hours were changed to from 1 to 3 p.m.

“They told me to get here early,” said Cross, adding that most people were already gone by the time his moved-up shift was ending.

Almost nobody wanted to talk about today, and the very real possibility of more bad weather on the horizon. One Overreacting Day at a Time seems to be the coping mechanism right now for people like Barone, who figured she’d hear sometime Wednesday night where she was expected to work from today. And for Pennycook, the SCAD student who gets texts or emails telling her when classes are cancelled, like they were on Wednesday.

When she moved here from Michigan about six months ago, Pennycook said, “I thought I would be tan all the time.” Instead, she finds herself thinking about winter weather a lot more than she ever expected to. And, well, maybe succumbing to a little, “You’re in Atlanta now” way of thinking, and some controlled overreacting herself.

“School got cancelled, so I figured I should do something,” Pennycook said a few hours before the wintry mix started falling on the Kroger parking lot. “I’ll go grocery shopping.”