This is the time of year when many people are filled with angst and fearful thoughts about what is going on in the world around them. The seasons are changing. It’s getting dark earlier again. Mother Nature seems to be in a rather petulant mood, sending storm clouds and unexpected winds, perhaps a smattering of cold heavy raindrops that at first you thought were going to be snowflakes but then turned into an ugly drizzle instead, just when you thought it was going to be a bright sun-shiny day.

The Institute has weathered many of these changes over the years and seeing the worry and discomforting feelings that arise during this changeover we have set our crack team of meteorologists to finding solutions to make this period a more stable and non-threatening time for you our loyal readers.

Our first task was to identify what it is exactly about this time of year that sends you into such a tizzy. We immediately set our survey department to work to determine the most worrisome problems in numerical order and came up with the top five reasons. As we felt this was a high-priority problem we suspended our usual mail, radio and TV ads to get information and took to the phones instead to get our information as directly and quickly as we could. We called everyone in our data banks and asked “What’s the big problem? What bugs you every fall? Have you sent us your free-will love donation yet and why not?” The answers we got were surprising. Here they are in order of importance.

Biggest Problems This Time of Year

1: Survey takers

2: Survey takers who ask us for money

3: Sunrises

4: Robo calls, especially those political ones

5: When Aunt Pheeb sends me out to pick blueberries when she knows the bear is out there and locks the door so I can’t get back in until the pail is full. She also puts peanut butter and honey sandwiches in my lunch bag when she knows I hate honey.*

* We almost didn’t include this one in our results because we know it came from Uncle Skid and you can’t trust a word he says, but since we could only contact about 7 or 8 people for our survey we had to include it to make the full five reasons.

The real surprise for us was “Sunrises”. That was an unexpected reason for worry. Since we only had a few moments to ask our questions before they slammed the phone down, we weren’t able to quantify why sunrises were a point of concern for you. Vexed, we racked our collective brain for possible reasons. Unfortunately we came up with nothing, Zippo, nada, nilch, not a thing. But !, and I cannot stress the importance of this, since this was a large concern for our responders, or in this case responder, we felt obligated to do whatever we could to alleviate this problem.

Tossing this hot potato back to our meteorologists and weather modifiers we gave them several hours to come up with a solution. And they did. Due to a legitimate fear of finding themselves back on the unemployment line they came up with a pretty darn good fix. Since the primary cause of fear was the fact that many people couldn’t see the sunrise due to things like blinding snowstorms, or intense darkness or having their eyes closed and thus became convinced that there wasn’t a sunrise thereby producing the angst and unrestrained panic that made them all crazy-like, we decided to tie the sunrise to not only early morning, but to the actual dawn part of the day. That’s the beauty part. That’s what makes this work.

That way people could depend on the fact that the sun would come up everyday, even if they couldn’t see it due to inclement conditions. They would know it was happening and be reassured. We also decided to add a spectrum enhancement that would occur every three or four sunrises that would be so spectacular that people would be talking about them for the next several days to get them over the next few days in case they didn’t get to see the sunrise, again due to crappy weather conditions.

These may seem like simple solutions after the fact, but if they were so simple why didn’t somebody come up with it before. Like maybe those guys sitting around in those big high paying think tank jobs, where they get to just sit around all day and think of stuff. There’s a waste of the taxpayers dollars if I ever saw one. This problem has been around for a while and we’ve fixed it in a few hours and do we get the big bucks? No sir-ree bob, we don’t. But your thanks are payment enough, so don’t worry, we’ll still be here to solve the worlds problems and do the hard thing when it needs to be done, because we’re The Institute and we’re here to help.

P.S. the image above is a sample of our new and improved uber-enhanced sunrises that we expect to be turning out by the boatload for your viewing pleasure.