WASHINGTON—Working around the clock to prepare for the Category 4 storm heading toward the Carolina coast, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency confirmed Tuesday they were frantically writing the apologies they will issue for screwing up their response to Hurricane Florence. “This is going to be big, so we need all hands on deck to determine what is absolutely going to go wrong in our half-hearted attempts to alleviate the damage from this devastating natural disaster,” said administrator William Brock Long, explaining that FEMA’s current strategy included crafting the language of dozens of necessary apologies to be circulated over the course of the coming weeks and shoring up its supply of requests for civilian patience in the face of government inaction. “It’s crucial that we get an accurate read on all the things we’re going to have to apologize for, so we have research crews hard at work trying to find information about what exactly we’re going to fuck up, how badly we’re going to fuck it up, and how long it will take before improvement of any kind actually happens. We have one apology ready to go for when we fuck up shelters, one for when we fuck up drinking-water supplies, and so on. We’ve messed this up in the past, and we want to ensure that we have a contrite expression of regret about our incompetence.” Long went on to state that crews were still hard at work coming up with an adequate apology for the agency’s pathetic attempts to assist Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

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