One time I got pissed off at a local weatherman for saying "The storm has blown safely out to sea.
I wrote the weather department about it and used the proper letter format and if you looked at the letter you would assume it came from someone that knew proper form and had some education. The letter looked very polished.
The salutation, instead of something like 'Dear Sir,' began with 'Hey, Asshole,' and I proceeded to point out that storms may blow out to sea, but they do not blow safely out to sea because there are a lot of people that work on the water that are caught up in it and it more often than not effects them a lot harder than it does Mr. and Mrs. America who are sitting at home in Suburbia and a nice, heated home.
I was not really polite as I had recently been through one hell of a 'Noreaster and a couple of the bruises I had received still showed.
It's not all about boats and the sea, either. There are a lot of careers out there where people work strange schedules and do different non 9-5 jobs to keep society moving. Many of them leave home and hearth for long periods of time in order to make a living. Not everyone gets to be Ward Cleaver and work at the office.
I've known any number of consruction workers that regularly work in remote camps of various projects. They may not get to home and hearth for months at a time. I took one of those jobs once and while I was single and had no home to begin with, some of my coworkers had wives and kids. They knew they would be gone from late April to the middle of September when they left to return home.
The guys that built the Alaska Pipeline were gone for months at a time and more than one of them 'worked over' on double shifts to fatten up the coffers. More than one home got built or paid off by these guys. College educations were financed.
(Of course some guys belew every dime in strip clubs and what have you but that's to be expected, too. It's called 'choices'.)
Hell, for that matter, the reason you can get up in the middle of the night and turn on a light to pee is because some engineer type is likely sitting in front of a panel full on gauges and instruments all night monitoring some section of the power grid. While he probably goes home daily his biological sleep schedule is likely a mess.
There are a lot of others out there. Long distance truckers are another. They go out in many cases for weeks at a time to points all over Hell's Half Acre moving all sorts of things.
Still, back to the ships at sea. About 90% of all goods travel by water at one time or another. Ask Karen how her priceless Ming vase she bought at Walmart for $2.98 arrived there and she'll likely say it was delivered by a truck even though it was made in China. I guess she thinks the Tooth Fairy brought it to the warehouse the truck driver picked it up from to deliver it to her nearby Wally World. Then again, maybe there are tunnels going around the world but I sorta doubt it.
There are a lot of other people that work out in the weather, too. Hell, even most carpenters framing houses have well used rain gear in their pickups. Fact is, I used to work for a guy that worked us senseless in rainy days and once in a whille when it cleared up and turned glorious he would tell us to roll our tools up and enjoy a beautiful afternoon. I liked the way that guy thought!
One of the things that really irks teachers is when they ask about how much money some of us make and they blow a gasket when they find out. Many times it is a lot more than they make in the classroom. Most times they prattle on about how unfair it is because they have degrees and so on.
Over the years I've offered to hook whiners like that up with seagoing jobs and they almost always reply that there's no way in hell they'd go away from home like that. I usually don't explain that the bigger paychecks are not paid because we have degrees but because we are inconvenienced.
The reason I said 'almost always' is because years ago someone took me up on it and went to work on the West Coast running barges up the inside passage to Alaska. He left the classroom in June and didn't return in September.
I met him a years or so later and he thanked me. Then several years later I met him again and he was the mate on a tug snd was still on the Alaska run and making a killing. Sometime after that a mutual friend said he had paid cash and bought a real nice place in Idaho.
Back to the letter I sent the weather people. I admit I was pretty nasty with the way I put things to them but I was surprised to get an answer AND a promise. While the storm may very well blow out to sea, it will never again blow SAFELY out to sea.
I liked that.
To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this:
http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY
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