Sunday, December 03, 2006

Classic Pag-Asa

No offense to the country's official weather bureau, but Pag-Asa is what one of my teachers in high school called a joke. They call off classes when so-called storms amount to fledging rain (or worse, sunshine), and allow classes to continue when there's a storm outside. Not that living in a tropical country makes meteorology easy by any means, it's just that we've grown accustomed to believing the opposite of what Pag-Asa declares.

And perhaps that's why Milenyo was such an awful typhoon. It's not that Pag-Asa didn't warn us, but it's the fact that they did. Who knew that their 1/100 forecast would actually come true? How did that old adage go? Even a broken clock will tell the right time.

Classes of course were called off last Thursday in light of an approaching typhoon that's even worse than Milenyo. Of course as far as Metro Manila was concerned, it was simply a windy day with some drizzle. And thankfully, when it was supposed to arrive last Friday, it didn't. Just relatively stronger winds and the DSL going out.

This is what I call classic Pag-Asa, or as far as the Philippines is concerned, all returns to normal. We can't have Pag-Asa predicting the correct weather, right?

1 comment:

banzai cat said...

Well, you can only go so far with predicting the weather. And for those in the Bicol region, it's definitely no laughing matter.