And the most imaginative plea yet to Congress to end this shutdown business goes to the National Weather Service in Anchorage. An official forecast yesterday contained pretty routine stuff, unless you happened to look at the first letter of every line, notes Techdirt. The coded message: "Please pay us." As Popular Science explains, federal workers at the service and at the National Hurricane Center are continuing to work with no guarantee of pay—otherwise we'd have no warnings about, say, dangerous tropical storms.
"There's no money to pay them," says Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization. It looks like they'll get it eventually, however. The House is expected to convene today and pass a measure guaranteeing that all furloughed federal workers get their back pay when the shutdown ends, reports AP. The Senate is expected to quickly follow suit. (FEMA had to call in furloughed workers as Tropical Storm Karen advanced toward the coast.)