You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
Severe Weather and the need to react and perhaps over react.
For most of you, when it storms, it’s a personal event. When a rain cloud drops out of the sky and a deluge dumps onto your windshield, maybe you pull to the side of the road, maybe you don’t.
If you are home, and it’s raining sideways, perhaps the weather people break into programming interrupting your favorite show. Are you scared? Or are you angry?
Whether you like it or not, your weather team, with its fancy storm branding, is going to interrupt programming. If you were watching a show, tough cookies.
So you are held hostage by your own tv. Every channel is a weather stare down.
So with the weather banging on your roof, you watch the storm front slapping your windows, while approaching on TV. It’s a long line of colorized energy that stretches a hundred miles across your viewing market. You are captivated by the wind sheer diagrams and pulsing, zooming graphics designed to alarm you, inform you, lull you into a false sense of cartoon security.
Perhaps you watch the approaching storm front. Perhaps the weather team has hypnotized you with its bright swirling oranges and reds and yellows circulating over cities near your house.
Perhaps this information is over load, like a syrup on top of Frosted Flakes. Perhaps the Four Warn Weather team is scaring you, making you nervous, prompting you to run for your safe place. Perhaps this cartoon diagram attracts you and draws you to the TV, forcing you to watch, to grab a snack, to pray that SNL, comes on soon.
Regardless of the Doppler Dysfunction floating across your flat screen, you have options. From safe places to snacks, you the storm viewer have a choice.
When it storms for me, I am caught in a duality of being like you and being like me.
Saturday Night a squawl rips across Middle Tennessee.
The weather people come on and take over programming.
Four Warn and Predictor and Sky Warn or some such nonsense all screaming in hushed meteorological tones.
“Take cover here. It’s raining there. There’s rotation in the clouds.”
At this moment the rain hits my window sideways.
Wow.
Aggressive weather I think to myself.
But it’s not a big deal. It’s rain beating on my window.
Then the phone rings.
It’s the station.
I stare at the number and think about letting it go to Voice Mail.
What do they want?
It’s rain. It’s wind. Really?
I think back to the 80’s before weather apps and wall to wall weather coverage.
Back then, this was just rain. It was just wind. We didn’t have doppler.
We just went about our night, not worrying, not knowing. We were stupid, ignorant, and perhaps better for it. Our homes were either destroyed or they weren’t.
Why would we think this is anything more than powerful rain.
I pick up the phone.
“Can you go downtown Franklin,” the exasperated voice whines.
“They have outages.”
I think about the beer I just opened. I think about my teenage son sitting on the couch. I think about the rain striking against the glass like R Kelly pounding an ex girlfriend.
They want me to go into the wind and rain and darkness.
OK. That’s my job.
I open the garage and the rain is swirling back and forth like an undecided voter a day before an election.
The street is dark and the rain aggressively assaults my windows like a homeless guy working an off ramp.
I head down Hillsboro Road and see swirling police lights.
Damn, maybe there is trouble, I think to myself.
I pull over and lower my window.
Rain is pelting me sideways.
I hold my iphone and push record.
I start narrating.
“The rain is heavy and the wind blowing. Franklin’s finest are out ….”
I pause for a moment as I start to see what is happening.
“As Franklin’s Finest are writing a ticket to a motorist, in a driving rainstorm. Nice.”
Click.
I proceed downtown. It’s stormy, but if the station hadn’t called, if the Four Warn Weather people hadn’t frightened everyone, I wouldn’t know that anything was awry.
It’s raining.
I proceed to shoot 7 videos, one more repetitive than the next.
I call the storm, moisture on my windshield. I call the wind, blustery. Saturday night traffic is slightly delayed, but hardly snarled.
I send it all back to the station.
I call and offer a live phoner if they want one.
They turn me down.
I head home. The rain is diminishing. I walk in and the Four Warn Weather people are still screaming the sky is falling, somewhere, just not here.
I turn on Saturday Night Live.
Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon are rapping in wrapping boxes somewhere in wrapper-ville.
By this time, the Four Warn Weather team has decided not to pre-empt SNL for fear that an entire viewing audience, 800,000 viewers will pick up the phone and scream in unison, “it’s not raining, put the show on.”
I’ve been in those newsrooms.
It reminds you there is a delicate balance between saving lives and howling at the moon for the sake of showcasing your new weather computers and fancy graphics.
So thanks rain storm for the opportunity to get wet, to see where my career has been and perhaps where it’s going.
Talk about Fore Warn? Is it time to move on, to find a new storm front to chase.
Life’s Crazy™