Occasionally I watch the local TV news to get the weather. Occasionally. And when I do, I remember why it’s easier and less annoying to simply read weather reports on the Internet. Or just look out a window.
You might be asking yourself, why? Why on earth do you need to know the weather in Phoenix? Isn’t the desert usually sunny and cloudless and doesn’t it rain like three days every year?
Yes, yes, and yes.
But, still…
Occasionally I just want to know, especially on a rare day when a wispy cloud drifts into the sky or the sky turns a tad gray. I mean, do I need to dust off my umbrella? Should I make sure my car’s windshield wipers haven’t disintegrated? These are the days when I flip on the TV and surf—maybe a few precious minutes in the morning—until I find the local news and wait for the daily weather report.
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. It should be, but it’s not.
Living in the desert, whenever the day is less than perfect, the weathermen on our local news stations go ballistic. That’s because they finally have something unusual to report. It’s the only state you’ll ever find weathermen who actually look forward to tornados and monsoons and floods. They’ll roll up their blue oxfords to their elbows and run the back of their hands across their shiny foreheads to remove a thin layer of building sweat as they dance across the television screen with weather-anxiety in their gleeful eyes. They can’t wait to give you the bad news.
And here’s the problem: In their jubilation, they twist and turn in front of the weather maps so you can’t see them. For some reason, they think that we’d rather see them with their arms flailing, legs twitching, and mouth spittle.
I say, Get out of the way! Let me see the radar maps! Please!
The maps and the charts are the only reason I tune in, even suffering through a few minutes of the mindless banter between the botoxed network anchors as they say something plastic and cheesy before mercifully turning the cameras over.
And then I’m treated to a full head shot of the crazed weatherman. That’s when I realize I should have simply logged onto weather.com and left my umbrella at home.
::Writer X also writes at The 100 Most Annoying Things::
