Coded message from the National Weather Service? ‘PLEASE PAY US’

Someone at the Anchorage, Alaska, branch of the National Weather Service seems to have a very important message regarding the federal government shutdown: “PLEASE PAY US.”

The acrostic message appears to have been included in the first paragraph of a weather alert issued from the office on Friday. In an acrostic message or poem, the first letters of each sentence in a paragraph combine to spell out a word that is separate from the larger text.

Employees at the National Weather Service, like many other federal government workers, have continued to show up for their jobs even as the government is in its fourth day of a shutdown.

NBC News attempted to contact someone at the office, but no one was taking credit, or blame, for the release.

A permanent link to the NWS update containing the acrostic message was changed a few hours after it was discovered. But technically, the original message is still up on the weather service site but is being pushed farther down the page as each new meteorological alert is issued.