Guide to Moral Living in Examples: Meteorology
Logan attempted, unsuccessfully, to push past the wall of old people that a bus had just ejected onto the sidewalk in front of him. He tried to hustle around them, only to be arrested by a couple with a stroller coming the other way. Then he stepped into the street and a taxi gave him an earful of horn and expletives.
“Goddammit, old people just get in the way,” Logan muttered.
He worked with them extensively in his position as Chief Meteorologist at the Midwest Weather Monitoring Station, or MWMS. When he arrived, sweaty and twenty minutes late to find one of his subordinate meteorologists waiting for him, Logan unloaded.
“All these geriatrics do is get in my way, slow me down, and complain.”
The unlucky meteorologist gulped.
“What is it, Tracy?” Logan asked. “I don’t like that look in your eye.” He noticed that Tracy held a thick folder, stuffed with sheets of paper.
“What are those?”
“These are, um, the complaints filed by the Forecasting Agents about the ice cream situation from last week.”
“Still? Getting rid of the ice cream bar is that big of a deal to these people? Their fucking grandkids need to call or something.” Logan opened the folder and saw the graceful penmenship of a complaint letter written by someone whose definition of word processing originated in an era when typing required the ability to ignore incessant clacking and clanging. The letter began “to the young man who removed the ice cream bar…”
Logan dropped the entire folder into the garbage can next to his desk. “No time for this. I’ve got today’s reports to collate and the fed is sending auditors this afternoon to go over our request for that new laptop.”
“Okay,” Tracy said.
“Did you pull the weather forecast?”
Tracy shook her head. “No, Kelly is working on the oscilloscope.”
Logan threw his hands up in the air. “Let’s go see how she’s doing,” he said. He barged through the office and into the Forecasting Center, where the Forecasting Agents performed their arcane rituals. They sat there, over five millennia of combined years, engrossed in a variety of activities. Some knitted, some read books, some worked on crossword puzzles. One intrepid fellow enjoyed his hard-earned right to bring in examples from his collection of antique guns and he took pictures and blogged about them on his brand-new laptop, for which Logan had to deal with auditors that afternoon. The only connecting factor besides age was chronic pain from injuries.
Kelly fiddled with a bundle of wires leading from microphones scattered around the room.
“Is that fixed?”
“Yes, it should be.” She flicked a switch.
A green line on the oscilloscope appeared and began to wave in a gentle up-and-down motion. One of the men groaned and the oscillation became more severe, and then resumed a low variance.
“Clear skies for this afternoon,” Logan said. He glanced at a sheet of paper being spit out by a machine that recorded the same data as the oscilloscope.
As Logan stood there, the green line began to bob. Murmuring among the Forecast Agents increased. The wand that ran over the recorded paper began to bob back and forth in long arcs.
“Thunderstorms?” Tracy asked. “Supercell approaching?”
Logan frowned. “No. This is indicating something more violent. That can’t be right, Kelly. Fix the oscilloscope right.”
Kelly looked hurt. “I know oscilloscopes, and I say it’s fixed. You can hear them groaning and moaning. Don’t blame my equipment.”
“Wait here,” Logan said. He went into his office and plucked an old book off of the shelf, written before weather forecasting used advanced computer equipment to record the aches and pains of joints in the old people. As Logan returned to the room, a man in a walker came up to him.
“My knee hasn’t hurt this bad since the maelstrom of ’59,” he said.
“My ‘ritis is flarin’ up!” roared a woman from behind the enormous quilt that she was working on.
The line on the oscilloscope stopped waving and began to wiggle.
Logan found the section in the book that he was looking for. The hand-written patterns recorded right before the maelstrom of ’59, when tornado after tornado stripped the land. Lightning strikes burnt down entire towns and torrential rains washed the ashes to the sea. The precursor to the Midwest Weather Monitoring Station, the Bureau of Midwest Storms, had shuttered their doors, which had been mostly symbolic because they were found embedded in a tree three miles away.
“Shit,” Logan said. “The Big One’s coming.”
The audit was cancelled. The forecast went out. Emergency supplies began to pour in. Tracy nailed boards over the windows of their building. Logan received confirmation from FEMA that they scheduled assitance to arrive within the month, and that when Logan began to realize how serious this was. He’d heard tales of the Maelstrom of ’59. Logan and the rest of the personnel at the Midwest Weather Monitoring Station called their families and sent them out of the region.
All afternoon the skies stayed clear, well into the evening. That night the area received a heavy drizzle that overwhelmed a storm sewer and emergency personnel were dispatched to clear the drain. They discovered a water-logged stuffed animal. Police opened an investigation into what was dubbed the Fuzzy Wuzzy Buzzy Bear Terrorist.
As dawn broke the next morning on a beautiful day for a picnic, Logan stormed into the Forecasting Center and confronted a room full of old people.
“Why do you people keep screwing me like this?!” he demanded.
“Why did you take away our ice cream bar?” one of the octogenarians said with a toothless grin.
The Moral: stuffed animals only get that way by taking food out of the mouths of orphans.
