I Am Not Sam Champion

I am not Sam Champion, people.  I assume for most of you this goes without saying, but at this moment in my life I think I really need to state it for the record.

As everyone knows, Hurricane Sandy bent the northeasten seaboard over her lap last week and spanked it in the bad way.  Lower Manhattan was blacked out (sidebar, one of the single freakiest experiences of my life was taking a shuttle bus down the Bowery to get home one night and not being able to see anything around the bus despite knowing I was in the middle of the one of the most populated areas in the country...suddenly Revolution on NBC became a whole lot scarier) and a lot of people lost a lot.  My heart goes out to them.  My heart does NOT go out to people who call me at my job and ask me a) what the weather was like during the hurricane (it was cold and wet.  And DARK.), b) what the weather is like at the present moment and/or c) what the weather will be like during their stay in New York. 

Yes, I work at a hotel...this does not mean that every morning I climb up onto my roof and check my meteorological instruments to have the most up-to-date information for you on any incoming weather fronts.  There are people who actually studied this stuff in college and went out and got jobs in which their sole purpose it to answer such questions and it turns out that THEY aren't all that good at it.  Why would you think I would be any better?  And by the way, if you're not coming in to New York for another month, why the hell do you care what the conditions are like at the present moment?  It really has no bearing on what they'll be like in 30 days, just like my pleasant tone of voice has no bearing on the fact that I'm mentally calling you every synonym for simpleton that I can come up with on the fly (moron, dumbass, halfwit, idiot, dolt, dunce, mouth-breather, parental disappoinment, gene pool hazard...).

If you simply can't live without knowing what the temperature is there is a whole goddamn television channel devoted to that if you're interested.  It's called the Weather Channel and they report a lot of information about, you guessed it, the weather.  It's actually their main focus, which you could probably extrapolate from the name if you really tried. If you don't want to watch TV, I have even better news for you...they set up a website!  It's true, if you want the weather to anywhere in the WORLD, you can go to...wait.  Are you ready to write this down?  Do you have a pen?  Paper?  You're sure?  Okay, you can go to "weather.com" (that's W-E-A-T-H-E-R-.-C-O-M), punch in any zip code or location that you want and they will give you...the weather.  And don't worry...if that sounds just too difficult there's a weather.com app.  Yes, that's right!  There's an app you can download right to your smart phone for free that will tell you everything you want to know.  You know who can't give you all the information that weather.com pulls up upon just a few key strokes?  ME.

I also love people who ask me what the weather will be like in a month.  No, really, I LOVE them.  They give me a chance to gaze into my crystal ball and peer into the future so I can really spell out for them exactly what the weather will be like in three weeks.  I get to use my clairvoyant powers so infrequently, and with that kind of thing it's really use it or lose it.  If I don't exercise these muscles, my ESP will become gangrenous and fall off like a vestigial limb and then I'll never get to be a real life super-hero.  So, thank you hotel guests who wonder the unknowable future...without you I'd never get any practice as a seer and my life-long goal to unseat Ms. Cleo as the go-to telephone psychic for the moronic masses would be dead before it ever got off the ground. 

In conclusion...I am not Sam Champion.  He's the one with the botox.