I say we fire all the weather forecasters
by
Robert LaFrance
As the faithful
(and long-suffering) reader knows, I used to work for the federal government’s
weather service. Although a mere ‘meteorological technician’ I did some
forecasting as well, including for a few weeks on television in Inuvik. Before
I began my prognostications, the ‘powers that were’ in the department (of
Environment) and the station I had a meeting and they gave me this advice:
“No human being
can predict the weather, so don’t even try.” And then one of those powers
added: “Unless you are working in Saskatoon. You can look out the window and
see a weather system coming from Red Deer, Alberta. Okay, you say, we’re going
to get rain at 3:47 pm…”
This is leading
up to a complaint about the weather forecasting in these parts: it stinks. A
few years ago we heard that Doppler Radar was going to start being used in New
Brunswick and that would improve things to no end. Guess what? It seems that
the forecasters now rely on that radar too much and do most of their weather guesses
from Tim Horton’s.
Since it’s
illegal to execute meteorologists for bad forecasts (as Hitler did more than
once) I suggest we fire a bunch of them and put them to work dredging out the
St. John River above Beechwood Dam even though, according to NB Power, that
area that didn’t retain any silt although the dam has been there since the
middle 1950s. R-r-r-right.
The storm we
received on Feb. 9 was supposed to flatten New England, and it did, but it
wasn’t supposed to give us in this area any more than some blowing snow. All
day long Feb. 8 I read forecasts from both NB and Maine and both insisted that
it would leave us, at most, 5 cm or two inches of snow.
I had fallen
asleep in my easy chair while I was watching TV Friday evening and went to bed
at 1:00 am. First I checked the forecast. Zap! Ten to fifteen centimetres
forecast for here, just like that. This is called ‘forecasting on the run’. It
means predicting good weather when it’s sunny and when you see it’s snowing you
predict snow. So much for 21st century technology.
A note to weather
forecasters: You do realize that the first part of the word ‘forecast’ refers
to something that happens BEFORE? If you look out the window and see that it’s
snowing, and you then start forecasting snow, you’re a little late. FOREcast,
FOREplay, FOREthought, FORErunner…these words refer to something that happens
before the main event. Repeat after me…
*****************************
“Money can’t buy happiness, but it
sure makes misery easier to deal with” goes the old saying.
I
continue to hope for either a Senate appointment or a lottery win, but I guess
I’ll just have to be satisfied with being good-looking and brilliant. Last week
I passed the one million dollar mark in the purchase of lottery tickets, all in
the hope of winning a million dollars. Makes you stop and think doesn’t it? I
wish it had made me stop and think about 1985. But, if we had that million,
then the kids and we would just fight over the keys to the yacht.
New subject:
Everywhere I look, it seems that someone is advising me to go and get a flu
shot. The only one I’ve ever gotten is the H1N1 a few years ago and I was sick
for a week. The upside was I couldn’t work. I know that the instant I type
these words I will get hit with this season’s flu strain and fall over in a
pile, but even so, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have Person A hit me
over the head with a baseball bat to prevent Person B from hitting me over the
head with a hammer. Now here’s a fun fact about flu: The Swine Flu
vaccine in 1976 caused more death and illness than the disease it was
supposed to prevent. Gives you confidence, doesn’t it?
Last week at the
club (where else?) I was sipping on a lemonade when Leroy Spade came in and
produced a photograph. He said the paper might be interested. “What does that
look like?” he said. It looked to me like a headstone (tombstone, etc.) with
the name Alcide Phonograf and the date 1903-xxxx. The year of death was covered
with duct tape. I asked Leroy what was supposed to be there. He said it should
have been 2001, but they couldn’t put that because Alcide had purchased a
pre-arranged funeral in 1985 and, not expecting to live past the year 2000, had
had the headstone maker put on the years 1903-19__, all in metal. Imagine the
earth-shattering problem when Alcide passed (meaning passed by) Dec. 31, 1999
without obligingly keeling over.
And you thought
you had problems.
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment