The Millennial's Hi-Tech Guide to This Super-Gross Heat Wave

Today, I arrived at the office for the fourth day in a row covered in a thin film of salty body moisture, huffing like I'd just completed a challenge on a reality show set in a jungle. When I got in, all of my co-workers agreed that it was very gross outside, before we started speculating about what would happen in the final season of Breaking Bad.

What is this unpleasantness now? As a Millennial stationed in the creative class, It is a tad perplexing. I am entitled never to have to sweat, as I have learned from think pieces in prestigious magazines. But I am also connected and plugged-in and more likely to use social media than drive a car. So I want to share with my network some of the things that I have learned about this unfortunate heat wave that is apparently peaking today that I have read about on the Internet.

A Google Image search reveals that there are actually people outside right now, even though it is literally a hundred degrees. What they're doing out there is unclear, but it must be pretty important, otherwise they'd be in air-conditioned places working on their computers like everyone else.

And maybe this helps? That's a NASA image depicting the scale of the heat wave, which currently stretches from the Northeast to the Midwest. This heat wave is apparently so big you can see it from space. When I share NASA images with my networks, they typically get a lot of likes.

This is good. It's L-degrees, a subway temperature monitor that tells you how hot it is on each of the stops along the creative class's commuter line of choice, the L train. But just on the L train, because where else are you going, midtown?

According to my iPhone app, it says it feels like it's 110F. Definitely ordering in for lunch today.

Apparently it is so hot that TV meteorologists have been forced to plumb stale pop culture axioms. Embarrassing.

This has all gotten me thinking: heat waves are terrible. They're inconvenient, and everyone seems to hate them. And science says that there's going to be more and more of them because global warming.

So I'm officially considering launching a start-up to tackle them—maybe, like, an app that lets you know when one is coming, so you know when to work from home. Or maybe something more ambitious, something inspired by Elon Musk or something, like making all the sidewalks in Brooklyn moving sidewalks in sealed glass tubes (so you can still see outside) that we can pipe air conditioning into. We'll see, it's still in beta.

Or maybe it will be just an awareness campaign kind of thing, that goes viral and tells people about the danger of heat waves, and that we're going to see a lot more of them very soon. Perhaps it will feature images of a construction workers out in the heat wave, lifting very heavy objects in the sun. Did you know that 760 people have died in the UK from the heat wave going on there, right now? Or that more people die from heat waves than from floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes combined? Share that on Facebook. Share this, too. And let's harness the crowd to end heat waves, together.