About 3 months ago I walked away from a 25-year TV weather career. During my final days, I posted 20 lessons I’d learned throughout my years in broadcast meteorology. In case you missed them on Facebook or LinkedIn, here is # 8. (All 20 can be found here on my main blog page. Scroll through the titles to see which topics interest you).
- EVERYONE LOVES WEATHER
I never noticed how much people “small talk” about weather until I became a meteorologist. Suddenly it seemed like everyone was chatting about the beautiful day or complaining that they needed rain or berating the “weatherman” because he got it wrong again. It’s easy to talk about weather over the water cooler since it’s all around us. Weather affects every person every day. The extensive research regularly conducted by TV stations shows that weather is the biggest reason people watch local news, especially in the morning. About every third person I meet tells me how they wanted to be a meteorologist when they were a kid. I also hear quite often about dogs who are afraid of thunder or babies who perked up when they heard my voice on TV. My favorite though is when someone passes me in the grocery store and says, “Hey, where is the rain?” or “I thought you said it was going to be sunny!” I was never sure how to respond since it usually required more than a one-word answer. Usually, the comment was about something I most definitely did NOT say, but that wasn’t really the point. Long ago, I stopped getting offended when someone seemed to be blaming me for bad weather. I reminded myself of two things: one, they were probably just joking around and thought they were being funny, and two, when anyone said anything to me about the weather it meant they knew me. They recognized me. They watched me. They associated me with weather. How much better was that for job security than sneaking through the store without one person connecting me to my job?
➡️ “The topic of weather isn’t small talk when you’re conversing with a meteorologist.” -Jarod Kintz
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