Weather

You know how sometimes the weather just doesn’t seem right? Those summer day’s where you need to put on a sweatshirt? Or the middle of winter and it’s not just sunny but too hot to be wearing jeans? Well I found out how that happens, I can’t tell you how I found out but I can tell you a little bit about what goes wrong on those days.

See, there’s this room, I don’t know where exactly it is but I got the feeling it was under a mountain or something, underground somewhere anyway. It doesn’t have any windows and there are a lot of long corridors and doors to pass through before you get there. But when you do, you open that last door and walk into this room. It’s a control room, to be honest it looks a lot like the kind of room you’d see in a movie about space shuttles or something. Only the technology seems to be a lot more advanced in this room than it was in the 1960s.

I think you’ve probably already worked out that this room is where they control the weather. I know, you all thought it was a natural phenomenon and couldn’t be controlled, you don’t really believe me at this point. But that’s ok, I’ll tell you anyway, I don’t have any interest in whether you believe me or not.

In this room there are two people working, the weather wardens as they are known. It’s a job with a lot of responsibility but not much training is really needed. The people who maintain the machines and update the software in the control room, they’re the rock stars of this outfit. The wardens fall more into the semi-skilled labor category. Usually, at least that’s what I’m told, one of the wardens will control the cloud and precipitation related systems and the other will control the wind system. The wind warden is usually the more senior of the wardens on shift, it’s a critical system and very hard control on a large scale. I know what you’re thinking “ahh, that explains cyclones and hurricanes and all of that” No, those are done on purpose, I cant go into why but when you see one of those you can be sure that the very best wardens are on duty that day.

Which brings me to the cause of those rogue weather events. Obviously there’s weather all of the time, it’s a twenty-four seven operation as they say. So the wardens are on a shift system, its usually four days on and two days off with the day, night and swing shits changing every two weeks. The thing with being a warden is that it isn’t especially well paid. They do get good money but most of that is hush money, this is the kind of information that can’t get into the public arena for a whole host of reasons. No as far as the pay scale at the weather control centre goes, the wardens are right on the bottom. So the big problem is motivation and absenteeism and this is where those rouge events come in. As I mentioned before, the wind is the most critical part, there’s a lot of power to be controlled. Think of driving a formula one car, now imagine that Michael Schumacher can’t make it in to the office today. Now also imagine that the other race car drivers are lowly paid and don’t want to come into the track today just because Michael is feeling off colour, it’s their day off and they’ve just come off two weeks of night races et cetera et cetera.

So, to stretch the metaphor further than even I thought possible, now you have your head mechanic trying to change the sparkplugs on the Ferrari and steer the thing at the same time. You see, the biggest problem that the world faces from a weather point of view is that of shift work scheduling. As I mentioned before, I don’t care if you believe me or not. I just thought I’d explain it to you and let you make your mind up. Whether you do believe me or not doesn’t matter, but what does matter very much is that you never mention this to anyone. This little secret has to go with you to your grave, it’s a very serious business this weather thing.