Last Sunday night, actually it was in the wee hours of Monday morning, I heard a ding on my phone. I also heard a ding on my wife Pat’s phone.
I could tell this wasn’t a text message, so there was no reason to be alarmed.
This was about 45 minutes after we had climbed into bed.
I stretched out my arm to reach the phone and it let me know it was 12:15 a.m. I glanced at the message. As I read it, almost in utter disbelief, the message was informing me we were under a winter weather advisory beginning at 0600 Tuesday, Jan. 24.
Really! About this time I wanted to choke whoever or whatever was responsible for this advisory that was letting me know we could have a winter storm possibly beginning in about 30 hours.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all about getting advance warning of a winter storm coming to our area. But like I was going to jump up and do something during the middle of the night when it was nearly a day and half from starting.
It aggravated me even more when I noticed that it came from the same TV station that I watched about an hour before going to bed so I already had a pretty good idea of what Tuesday’s weather could and probably was going to be.
This was almost like a friend playing some dumb joke on me when he didn’t have anything better to do during the middle of the night.
More than anything else, it was annoying to get such a message at that time of night. If there were any immediate danger, or a storm was approaching even within a few hours, sure I could understand. But this wasn’t anything like that.
While I appreciate the weather forecasters providing us with plenty of advance notice on the wintry weather, I think they have a tendency sometimes to go a little overboard.
As my wife puts it, “They like to hype it up and try and get us all excited.”
She gets to where if we’re watching the late night news, weather and sports, she leaves the room. Once she’s heard the forecast within the proximity of when it’s supposed to happen, she’s done.
I admit I’ll go ahead and watch it cause I want to see what the sports guy has to say afterwards.
I just think these alerts they put out don’t have to be done during the middle of the night unless there is some pressing danger. From now on, spare me please.