At work, people actually used to joke that if there was ever a zombie apocalypse, they wanted to be with me. I say "used to" because as of this week I'm no longer employed (I had a seasonal job picking berries and blueberry season is now over). I always thought the two main factors that contrubuted to that were my pteparedness and the fact that my work clothes have a distinctly military apearance (because they're the BDUs and load bearing gear I've deemed expendable either because it's been thrashed or is outdated. I also started wearing an olive drab motley wrap to cover my face when our supervisor started wearing his desert camo headwrap, which signaled to me that we were allowed to do things like that to look cool).
The other factor was that I was the best equipped person in the field. In my left cargo pocket I carried an army surplus personal first aid kit with (in addition to the original contents) four gel capsules filled with ground kava root to self-medicate for anviety and a P-38 can opener (like the ones we used in Vietnam) and a shemagh. In my left front pocket I had my leatherman, in my right front pocket I had a roll of woodland camo duct tape that I'd sanded down just a bit so that it wasn't shiny and a cheap Wartech brand pocket knife, in my wight cargo pocket I gad a one quart canteen, in my left back pocket I carried my motley wrap when I wasn't wearing it and in my right back pocket was my wallet. In addition to this, I brought an OD duffle bag to work containing my lunch, romeos (I removed my boots before entering the building where we stored our equipment so I wouldn't track anything in) and a small can of WD-40. I brought my Ka-Bar to work a couple times, but I stopped because I figured someone would eventually do something stupid like report my for bringing a weapon to work even though A: it's a useful tool and B: There are so many pieces of equipment on any worksite I've been on that could be used to kill someone that bringing anything short of a grenade launcher to work wouldn't make someone any more capable of killing someone than they already would be. Have you ever seen an idiot try to hit targets with a nail gun or drive a moving van recklessly? It's way more dangerous than almost any concievable knife-related accident.
The TL;DR version is that most people seem to believe that I'd be better suited to surviving something like that than them.
17 Aug 2014, 7:51 pm
