Not Less Than Zero
Being a weather forecaster is one of the few jobs where constant failure is not only accepted, it’s expected. Hardly the same bar as, oh, say, airline pilot or surgeon. All you have to do is be tolerant of lots of ribbing from your co-workers, friends and family and you can make a nice living. There are limits to this, however. If you’re a weather forecaster who is unafraid to predict blizzard conditions when everyone else in Miami says sunny and 85, you’ll become notorious, but get such high ratings for being an idiot, that every station will want you and you’ll make millions of dollars. Crime and stupidity pay off big time these days.
In case you hadn’t noticed, weathermen/women aren’t called that anymore. They’re meteorologists. This is a house of cards, however. If weather people are meteorologists, what do we call people who study meteors? Now they have to change their titles, Wite-Out their diplomas and pencil in cosmologist, a title they hate because people are always confusing them with cosmetologists, who are make-up artists. And as far as they’re concerned, apparently being an artist wasn’t lofty enough. Hence their new title. This whole thing is going to come to blows and there will be blood which, btw, is 98.6 degrees under partly cloudy skies at the moment.
Understand, I have nothing against weath…meteorologists. They have a lot of angst. I get that. Their jobs have become obsolete. Weather reports are available for wherever we are whenever we want from the app on our phones. But it’s still not totally accurate. It may look like it “knows” the outside temperature for the town I’m in, but it doesn’t take into account that I live next door to a leaking nuclear reactor.
And what’s with this “real feel” on my weather app? I don’t get this. If it’s zero degrees, but the “real feel” is -18, as it warned me the other morning, then it is -18. If that’s what it’s going to feel like to me, then that’s what it is. Telling me the real feel is -18, but it’s really 120 above is not going to make me feel any warmer.
Besides, how can anything be colder than zero degrees? Isn’t zero supposed to be the absolute lowest you can go? Isn’t that where things start or end up? So how can you have negative degrees? I can’t have -2 gallons of gas in my car. And after a certain point, does the temperature even matter? Can you really tell the difference between -18 degrees and zero degrees? Are you now not going to go naked bull riding, but would have when you thought it was zero? Either way, your tongue is still going to stick to a flagpole, and people will still take your wallet, phone and all the extra heavy clothing you put on because you thought there was a difference between 0 and -18.
The best solution to this is that when it gets below zero, my weather app doesn’t need to get so specific. It’s TMI. It should simply read out: “Cold.” For me, that’s all I need to know.