United States, East Coast
National Guard troops practice putting an “O” before “A” in a readiness simulation run by Homeland Security
Bracing for an unprecedented period of chaos, emergency crews, media outlets, government, and industry are all preparing themselves for the fucking-up of the National Weather Service official storm name “Joaquin” given to the category 4/5 storm barreling down on the United States mainland.
“Jesus Christ, this is going to be a complete shitshow,” said Emergency Services Response Director for Central New Jersey Tony Clarkson. “I swear, they couldn’t give the only category 5 in a decade a name like ‘Bob’ or ‘Steve’ for fuck’s sake? Half of my service guys are already calling it something sounding like ‘jock-quin.’ The radio traffic alone is going to be a nightmare.”
The insurance industry is expected to be particularly hard hit. Marcia Cranston, director of claims for the Haveford Group says she expects at least 10% of claimant forms to name the storm as beginning with a ‘w.’ “The last storm to cause significant damage beginning with that letter was Wilma in 2005. Now our system will to try and class this storm with that one because of people screwing the name up. This is going to take months to sort out. And the 10% number might be low, for all our sophisticated models we really have no good way of predicting what will happen.”
“There were people who spelled ‘Sandy’ with a ‘c’. No, I am not shitting you.”
Many are hoping against hope the storm will save the bulk of its punch for Brooklyn or Hoboken, or possibly a college-heavy area like New Haven or Boston where the preponderance of classics majors and hipsters who enjoy the films of indie favorite Joaquin Phoenix will limit the possible disruption to manageable isolated communication outages.
“At least it’s not likely to hit the Deep South,” Cranston said, breathing a sigh of relief.
At press time tropical depression Krzesisław was forming off the West coast of Africa and is being monitored by the National Weather Service Hurricane Center.
Pronounced like the Catholic Church in Rockport?
Oh, wait….
Is that “wait” with a “J?”
That was Saint Joke-ems.
This is so racist. Every woman in America knows exactly how to pronounce that name. They’ve been practicing it in their dreams for some time