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Pastimes : Help Mike score a new job! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bonnie Bear who wrote (18)	4/4/1999 1:10:00 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23

Oh no need to PM, my life is an open book, not a very interesting book, but no secrets. And I enjoy chatting it up on these public threads. With just a B.S. in atmospheric science, BS is about all weather forecasters like me are good for! Still, I am frequently astonished by how bad the forecast is--weather forecasters are constantly surprised. There is this crazy idea at the NWS put out by our new boss--we are the "No surprise weather service". What a joke. The nature of weather is its unpredictability. The best a person can do is find the consensus forecast, and then clearly communicate that to people. That is something that is not done well right now by anybody--at least in my area. The TV guys are mostly terrible, radio is a joke-- although NPR does a good job of reading the forecast clearly. All the other stations muddle it all up, or add bogus commentary. I am sure that people just want to know if it's going to rain...or when the big storm will hit etc. Forecasts like "Mostly cloudy with scattered showers ...mainly north part in the afternoon" just go in one ear and out the other (nevermind how badly detailed forecasts such as an airport terminal forecast or the marine forecast are communicated). Anyway...I would like to see myself at home, taking care of kids, and posting a daily weather forecast for my area. It should be a cinch to best the NWS at this game--take what is already a pretty good product, and then just remove the errors, or the occasional bad thinking once a week. The missing ingredient for my plan, is that my wife the lawyer has to stay at her job, and apparently she wants to quit if "we" get pregnant. On one income my "journeyman forecaster" job starts to look pretty good. (twelve years with the NWS, and I am still a general forecaster --did not kiss enough butt probably, heheh) So the prospect for creating my dream job of raising kids, trading stocks, and posting an incrementally improved forecast for Seattle on the web, does not look especially good right now. I may still jump ship for teevee someday, my face looks just old enough now to be on TV...but I will have to practice doing broadcasts in front of my camcorder for a few years...and then try out in a much smaller market than Seattle, maybe Spokane. Thanks for asking, like I said, I get a kick out of chatting it up. I remember you Bonnie, from the Kahuna thread--I never did buy that gold however...and that was a good call so far. --Mike