Part 2 - What Now?

Preparing for a zombie outbreak is kinda like preparing for how you're going to spend your money if you win the lottery; you can do all the planning you want, but chances are you'll never have the opportunity to follow through on those plans, and even if you do get the chance, you cannot predict how things will actually happen.

Having said that, two things immediately apply: 1) Fail to plan, plan to fail. 2) It's better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

The first thing I'm considering is how to react to different situations. The situations I refer to are the different classes of zombie outbreaks. You wouldn't prepare yourself for a blizzard if light rain was in the forecast, nor would you plan for a day at the beach if a tsunami was heading your way.

The facts are I live in a densely populated urban area, and work in a large metropolitan downtown core. I take public transit to and from my "9-5" job on weekdays. Although I have a child in pre-school, she's only there for a couple hours a day, for a few days a week. Otherwise, the rest of my family tends to be close to home for most of the week.

If an outbreak were to occur locally, chances are very slim that, given the above information, we would be witness to either a Class 1 or a Class 2 outbreak, first hand. Given the population density both at home and at work, a Class 3 would be the most likely, and hopefully before then it would be all over the news. Hopefully.

Unfortunately, what I did not mention previously is that we live a couple hundred meters from a hospital, and I work less than a kilometer, as the crow flies, from a hospital downtown. Although you probably wouldn't find Patient Zero at a hospital, you'd probably find Patients 8 - 200. Should it arise, I could experience a Class 1 outbreak at home, and a Class 2 outbreak while at work. Easily. Regardless of what the chances are, I must take both into account.

For a Class 1, my priority would be to defend my family, but more importantly, to get ourselves into a safer situation (Lesson #9). At home, this would mean arming ourselves, locking the place down, and waiting it out. At work... well, it's not like I can carry weapons around at work, so getting to a safer location would be the priority.

The way life works, however, is that things don't always go according to plan. What I'm getting at is this; close your eyes and think about what would you do during an earthquake? Okay, now that you've opened your eyes, where did you picture yourself? At home in front of the TV, in bed, in front of the computer? Maybe at work? Of course, you're not going to picture yourself taking a dump in the local mall because there must have been too much MSG in the chow mien you just ate, and you're bowels are hating your for it... but that's where you might be when an earthquake hits.

Although I cannot plan for every contingency, if I at least have knowledge, training, and some awareness, I can at least rely on that to help me get to a situation where I can act on my planning.

Right now, this means taking stock in what I currently have, what I need, where I am, and where I would need to get to should the Zeds come knocking.

In the next post, I shall look at the home situation, my personal situation, and what I need to do to improve those situations. Of course, this assumes that I don't pick up on the warning signs soon enough and can't get my family out of town before the town decides to get out of town.