"So you study meteors?"

I like being a meteorologist, for several reasons, one of them being that other people think it's a cool job. When people ask what I do for a living, I like telling them that I do something interesting that very few people do. It's not like being an accountant or a computer programmer or something boring like that. I'm likely the only person they have met that is a meteorologist. Except in our small Southern town. Here, it's a little different. When I tell people where I work, sometimes I have gotten the response of "you must work with so-and-so". Even though my office is small, it is famous in the town. I tell people where I work, and they know exactly where it is. I kinda like that. It's very visible off the major highway through town, and everyone knows what it is. In the big city where I worked before, no one knew where the office was. After telling people I'm a meteorologist, the first question out of their mouth was usually, "What TV station do you work for?" That drove me nuts. I'm a real meteorologist, not a TV personality. Here in our small Southern town, I don't get that question, because there are no TV stations. Another remark I hear a lot is "I always wish I could have done that", or "I've always been interested in the weather". It does take a special breed to be a meteorologist. You have to love your job, because there are times of great stress and times of great boredom (right now, I'm in one of the latter, obviously), and you have to work crazy hours. Most meteorologists I know knew that they wanted to be one early in life, usually as a result of a weather disaster they experienced. Mine was Hurricane David, 1979 - blew down trees and flooded our street - it was awesome. I can remember many times looking out the front door of our house at the clouds, seeing which way they were moving, and predicting it was going to rain. I always watched the weather reports on the news (before The Weather Channel was invented). Apparently a lot of people like weather as a child, but never follow through with it as a career. They end up choosing something that's boring all the time, like accounting or computer programming. I can't relate to that. I like doing something different. Thankfully, I haven't gotten too many of the "so you study meteors?" questions.