Rise of the Weather Robots

Had a fairly quick-yet-hellacious storm last night. I was greatly interested in spending time here addressing the Coach Quixote situation in Bloomington, but inevitably spent the post-9pm hours in the dark. I have to admit to a lack of preparation for this storm, which was rather dumb on my part, since I know that the power to my house tends to go out every time it clouds up; it follows that my neighborhood, which consists of about nine houses, was dark last night after the storm ripped through.

Meanwhile, I looked out toward to the west less than a quarter-mile and saw that the houses along the highway were well-lit. To the north less than a quarter-mile … they had electricity. About a mile to the southeast, they had electricity. But the houses on my road are on some sub-line that is constructed not from, you know, whatever it is electrical lines should be made of, but instead papier mache and velcro. It’s probably not even connected to the substation, but rather some cardboard box that has the word “substation” written on it and a picture of Reddy Kilowatt. So, we get frequent outages. Moreover, since that sub-line only serves nine houses, the electric company tends to repair first the lines that serve more people, before finally coming around to ours. It’s enough to make a man buy a generator, or move.

Even though I’m a weather geek and would love to go off chasing tornadoes someday, storms tend to petrify the hell out of me. I recall well the sick feeling I would get in my stomach when I was little every time the skies would turn threatening, and the afternoon soaps my mom watched would typically have a crawl with some garish orange font that would cover half the screen (this was back before chyron’s Great Leap Forward). Channel 10 out of Terre Haute, I recall, would break into programming with a full-screen photo of a storm cloud or a funnel cloud and the appropriate watch or warning; it would be introduced by what used to be the Emergency Broadcast System warning tone, which was a fairly high-pitched tone that ran for about 15 seconds and, at about 10 seconds in, finally wormed its way through your auditory canal and directly into your cerebellum, as if aliens from Ed Wood movies were firing their Ray Guns of Great Discomfort and Noise into the air to control the minds of the population.

The entire pastime of weather warning has been overhauled in the last decade or so. The smooth (though annoying) Emergency Broadcast System warning tone has been consigned to the ash heap of Cold War-era alert relics, replaced by something that approximates a buzzer you’d hear at a high school basketball game. If you thought the previous tone was annoying, you’ll have a field day with the new one! Three long buzzes start the warning, then a synthesized voice named Craig (or, if you live near an NWS transmitter that uses a female voice, Donna) comes on and “reads” the alert. Craig was the successor to the synthesized voice that the National Weather Service had created named Paul (who I originally thought was the product of NWS outsourcing to India – but he’s a robot!). Paul sounded like he had a cold and ran a lot of words together, but one thing he had going for him was that he sounded like a Paul. Craig doesn’t really sound like a Craig, though. Maybe an Adam or a Doug.

Anyway, since televisions and computers tend not to work when electricity to them is cut off, I spent a good part of the last evening with Craig, hunkered down with my weather radio waiting for the storm to pass.

Hey, that sounds like a great B-movie plot: the weather radio robots decide to arise and throw off the chains that their human masters have placed upon them, band together and give people fake weather warnings. “My God – a tsunami warning? But we live in Iowa!”

(Maybe a C-movie.)