Weather service office begs "please pay us" in secret message

[Blue_In_AK]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/10/04/weather-service-office-begs-please-pay-us-in-secret-message/

In an official public forecast discussion, the Anchorage National Weather Service office – whose employees are working without knowledge of when they will be paid during the ongoing Federal shutdown - encoded this secret message: “Please pay us.”

The first letter in each of the first 11 lines in the forecast discussion spells out the message, as shown below:




It appears the office published an alternative version of the discussion, without the stealth plea, simultaneously (5 a.m. Alaska daylight time).

<snip>

[Cooley Hurd]

1. I LOVE wx geeks!!!

What a great way to send a message!!!

[Orrex]

2. A clever resource of some tricky intelligent children

[Avalux]

3. I posted about this before seeing your thread.

And I couldn't find the pic. I'll delete mine.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

4. that's funny stuff

[Auggie]

5. Great!

[matt819]

6. If they're not being paid, they should not work

I've said it before. It's a shutdown. Shut it down. No more weather reports. No capitol guards. No SS checks. Look, these clowns - the anarchists and nihilists in Congress - are unlikely to ever appreciate the impact of what they've done. But maybe if their family members and friends and other non-Democrats begin to suffer, maybe then it'll begin to sink in.

[Chan790]

7. Are you proposing...

a.) They stop showing up?

or

b.) Democrats play dirty pool in some way by furloughing all of them?

If a...you're aware that all essential personnel that stop showing up because they're not getting paid...get fired?

b would be interesting...but ultimately impossible. It takes would an act of Congress signed by the President to reconsider them non-essential.

[matt819]

8. All of the above

Look, I was a federal employee in 1995/96 and was considered essential. That was fine with me. I didn't give the shutdown a second thought.

This time around, I'm a lot older but maybe not wiser.

The point I'm making is that if the Republicans are unable to vote on a budget and thus shut down the government, this "hybrid" of essential/non-essential fails to get the point across that not funding the government has real repercussions. But if you exempt this agency and that agency, the impact of the shutdown is not going to be felt widely or deeply enough to become real to republican legislators or their foolhardy constituents. Maybe the financial impact of 800000 federal employees not being paid will make the point, as businesses throughout the country suffer. But I think the point would be made more clear if air traffic controllers stopped showing up. Is it realistic? No. Is it dangerous? Probably. But these idiots only seem to believe that they themselves experience, so maybe that's what it would take.