For continuing coverage, visit Buildings and Food.
Thursday May 19, 2005
Bad Wind
An occasional series on hurricane season
[Contributed by Steve Klotz]
Three weeks before hurricane season
and the weather bunnies are already worked into a froth,
cooking up Worst Possible Scenario
to scare the snot out of us…
“Three storms a week, 80 of them major,
35 certain to strike south Florida between the Golden Glades and Metrozoo!
Run! Buy batteries, insurance, and a spare generator!
You need an ocean’s worth of bottled water
and a boxcar’s worth of canned okra!
Board up the cave!
For chrissake don’t panic!! DO NOT PANIC!!!!!!
And Stay tuned to ME and THTS STATION all day and night!!”
Hey fellas, keep it wrinkled, okay?
I dial up the electric company to see what they learned from last season
to do a better job this year.
Certainly after a half century of hurricanes,
including last year’s pounding that left thousands of customers
without power for weeks on end,
Florida Plunder & Loot (FPL to you)
is all set for the season, right?
“Damn betcha, we’re ready already!” says the voice on the phone.
“We closed up the stateside Emergency Help Call Center,
and hired a terrific Hot Line Report Service in Bangladesh
to handle all distress calls.
They’ve been specially trained by laid-off airline reservation agents
skilled in Sympathetic Delay Management:
once callers get through, these folks’ll know just what to say
to keep ‘em on perpetual hold without committing the company
to any specific course of action or expense!
We’ll have 2 complete layers of useless information-botchers
who only know enough English and Spanish to promise to refer complaints
to a non-existent ‘Supervisor’ who will call back ‘immediately.’ Ha!
“And we relocated all emergency equipment to flood-resistant
safe zones in central Georgia and Alabama to ensure their availability
no less than 10 days after flood waters recede!
That means all three replacement generators and both service trucks
will stay high and dry, ready for deployment
once our local administrators return from their mountain headquarters!
“We know a lot about handing emergencies here at FPL!
What better use for the revenue earned from those rate increases
besides our customers’ safety and service?”
Don’t know about you, but I’m buying rubbers.
[Previously by Steve: Orgasm Day | Fruit Loops | Ticket Clinic]
· Post to del.icio.us, digg, reddit · Comment feed for this post: RSS, atom
Rubbers & sun tan lotion !! Don’t forget the sun tan lotion! You’ll need it after the water recedes! Insurance? You don’t need no stinkin insurance! The day is coming soon when there will be no jingling deep pocket hoarding insurance companies writing. Why I can hear them scurrying as I type. After all guns & masks are free here in paradise. ;)
Following Hurricane Andrew, I spoke with a Red Cross worker on behalf of my Service Club to see if there was anything we could help out with. “What do you need the most?” I remember asking.
“Ice” he replied at once. And after a pause, “And bullets. Ice and bullets would be great.”
We arranged for ice.
What a great fukin story, ice and bullets…sounds like a great group show. I have an uncle that works as a camera man for nbc 6, during last hurricane season, the station informed the entire crew {anchors and grunts alike} to prepare for the worst during every warning. Most of my family assumed that we had an inside source, so we proceeded to buy all the bullets and ice we could find,,
My grandmother has a friend who know some big guy at the hurricane center at FIU. Last year she (my gram’s friend) was out of town and wanted to know if she should go back to her South Florida home to prepare for Hurricane whatever. The man at the hurricane center said, “Don’t bother, it’s going north.” This was a WEEK before landfall. Apparently those margins of error are grossly exaggerated for sensation and ratings (???)
Hurricane’s suck but I got news for u get a kidney stone and you’ll trade it in a flash for one blowing past u house at 100mph. Suffered through 1 Sun evening the 22nd and thank GOD for morphine is all I can say. Resting at home now on Vicidan and praying the stone passed? I think it did but I forgot to piss into the screen so who knows? Isn’t life grand?