Thinking myself perhaps overly self-important, I may have done something I need to undo.
I have, in the past, been unfair to weather people, aka meteorologists, to put it in a way that someone who is self-important should.
I have made claims that were perhaps unfair about people in nice clothes taking up too much time in the middle of the newscast telling us there was a 50% chance of something bad happening and a 50% chance of something good happening. That’s pretty much how everyday goes in the real world. You take the good with the bad. I didn’t need someone reminding me.
I also made perhaps false claims that this is something I could have done and done well. What other kind of a job offers the cushion that you only need to be right some of the time? I’ve said it’s an easy profession. Weather travels from west to east, for the most part. If you’re a weather professional in the middle of the country, I felt you had a pretty easy job. Talk to a friend a couple hours west, see what it’s like, and you pretty much know what it’s going to be like where you are in a little while. My mom and her sister lived six hours apart when I was growing up. They’d talk on the phone. My mom would get a report that it was snowing in the middle of Minnesota, and I’d get sent to school the next day in boots. Their telephone tree forecasts were also probably at least hitting the 50% mark.
Now, I know it’s not entirely my fault, but there’s a meteorological purge of sorts underway. Stations are ditching or threatening to ditch their local weather forecasters in favor of someone hundreds of miles away doing forecasts for 50 stations at once. That person probably can employ the same science as the locals, they just aren’t out on some kind of a weather deck, bundled up in the winter, holding an umbrella in the spring or grilling brats at 5 a.m. in the summer.
We used to be inundated with the weather. Drive for a while in the car, and you’d get the same forecast on a loop 42 times a day. Start on the road early enough, and you still get yesterday’s recording. These weather folks got complacent, perhaps. They thought that shot every Feb. 2 with them and the groundhog guaranteed them jobs.
I learned this week that I still want them around. I still don’t think it needs to be a third of the nightly newscast, but weather is something that’s out of sight and out of mind for me. Sure, there are phone apps, but I use those in the moment. “Hey it’s snowing. When’s it going to stop?” That kind of thing.
I got caught by surprise two mornings in a row. Sunday and Monday, my first words were, “Huh, I didn’t even know it was supposed to snow.” It didn’t change my day much, but it could have. What if there would have been a blizzard? And to top it off, it was followed by an event where the temperature dropped like 20 degrees in an hour overnight. I had no idea.
I need weather people back in my life, especially since I can’t get the next day’s forecast from my mom anymore.