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Ya know, I try to follow directions. I really do!

In fact I’m the 1 person in my family that pulls out the direction sheet or pamphlet to follow the directions for putting things together. I read them and I try to interpret them so we can get things put together the way they’re suppose to go.

But just like those assembly instructions that come with misleading and untranslatable steps I’ve found it difficult and sometimes impossible to follow the instructions given by our local television station during severe weather warnings.

For instance:

Last night we were having extremely bad storm with heavy rain, winds up to 60 mph and a tornado watch. And of course our local TV stations were running their warning messages constantly across the bottom of the screen.

The first problem I had was with actually reading their instructions. I read them the first time I saw them and then tried to check them every few minutes to see if they’d been updated. After about an hour I caught myself ignoring them all together. I asked my family if they’d been reading the warnings and they said they read the 1st one and hadn’t checked them since.

Since I’m sure the goal of the station is to actually keep everyone informed with up to date information I’d suggest they do something to remind us viewers to check the message when it’s been updated. I doubt that my family is the only 1 that incorporates that message border as part of the picture in their brain and then just ignores it. Maybe the stations could change message color or put in a 30 second break or something that could tell us to read the message again.

Now the second problem I had was with some of the instructions given inside the warning messages. These instructions included:

• “If you’re driving turn around and don’t drown” – First I’d like to say that anyone driving in a heavy rainfall where you can’t see the front of your car and the winds are gusting up to 60 mph, you shouldn’t be driving. Secondly, if you are driving in that type of weather you better not be watching TV let alone reading messages.

• “During flash flooding climb to higher ground” - This is good advice if you happen to be an able bodied adult and there is higher ground suitable for climbing where you are. However I’ve lived in places where you couldn’t climb to higher ground unless you were an expert rock climber and now live where there’s either no higher ground or hills with very loose dirt. Since I usually have small children with me I doubt I could climb a rock cliff or scramble up a slippery and unstable hillside while carrying or dragging 1 or 2 kids with me. And I for 1 am not leaving them behind! So to be safe, we get to higher ground when there’s a warning and before any flash flooding has occurred.

• The combination of these 2 messages: “Stay away from electrical appliances” and “Stay tuned for further weather updates” – Is it me or do these 2 statements contradict each other? Isn’t a television an electrical appliance? Since I can’t do both I do what I can by staying away from my electric kitchen appliances, my laundry appliances and my computer. Of course that doesn’t mean that someday I won’t be killed by television while staying tuned to watch weather updates.

  Now sometimes I do stay away from all electrical appliances and don’t stay tuned for weather updates because sometimes we lose power and because we use a satellite TV service. Now it’s not my fault that I didn’t stay tuned when we lose electricity. You can blame the power company for that 1. And it’s not my fault when we don’t have television service since the signal can’t always get through the bad weather. Like last night when we lost service for a couple of hours while we were experiencing the worst of the storm.

  Maybe instead of telling us to stay away from electrical appliances and to stay tuned they should tell us to stay away from electrical appliances and tune our emergency transistor radio to a local station for further weather updates. We could actually follow both of those instructions and even get information about when power might be restored.

Well those are my thoughts about some of the stuff the TV station writers say in their severe weather instructions. If you think I’m right or wrong please leave a comment to let me know.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. By the way, if you happen to know who did it on the Mentalist last night please leave a comment and tell me. We lost our signal before the last 15 minutes of the show and would really like to know if it was the husband, the lover, the ex-secretary or someone else we hadn’t seen yet. Thanks