Be Prepared

 I spent 9 years of my youth in one of the various Boy Scouts of Canada clubs. Beaver, Cubs, Scouts. Aside from never really getting my knots down, I enjoyed the experience. Sometimes I wish I still had my Scout book. Maybe I'll find one at a thrift store sometime. 

The Scouts have a motto: Be Prepared. Now, that motto talks a lot about duty, and I think duty and responsibility are important parts of being prepared. But I've always felt that being prepared was a lot about being ready to respond to a large range of scenarios. You could be useful, but also life-saving. 

The motto seeps into a lot of my life. My everyday carry is a pocket knife, phone and a lighter. They're pretty useful a lot of the time, and they prepare me for a number of emergent situations as well. 

The backpack I take to work is even worse. Pens, a flashlight, a fingernail multitool, a cloth, a notepad, an umbrella and at any given time, typically some coffee, water and food. I'm prepared for an awful lot. Add to that dressing in layers and with some foresight, and I get through quite a large swath of life. 

Enter, last Thursday and a kinda nasty rain/windstorm by local standards. The forecast was calling for some really rough weather. In a first for me, the forecast even said that there was a possibility that utilities could be affected. 

The morning dawned reasonably mild, but it had that wet quality to it that reminded me I should bring my raincoat. We were commenting on the deteriorating weather at every morning meeting, and no sooner had my final meeting in the afternoon ended than the power went out. 

I kept busy for a bit, did my notebook, wrote some emails, and tidied up my desk. But everyone around me was getting more and more worried. The office soon started clearing out. Since I'm just recovering from my most recent gout attack, I opted to stick around until the power came back and avoid taking 18 flights of stairs to street level. Then the evacuation alarm went off. 

So, I grabbed my coat, my backpack, and I headed down the stairs. We were corralled out to the parking lot across the street, out in the rain and wind. Then the instruction came, "If you can get home without re-entering the building or parkade, you're dismissed for the day."

There was some real math here for me. 1 mile walk home, about a 1/2 mile walk to the bus, but there's an even-odd chance that it never shows up because the wind is so bad they're taking them off the road. I chose to take the walk home. The power was out, so there was no light at Albert and Saskatchewan Drive - a dangerous intersection at the best of times. Then just uphill on Albert, into the wind on Dewdney, and I was home - completely exhausted. 

I had been prepared with the right clothing and good shoes. But I was very, very exhausted. I'm out of shape from that gout attack, and I was barely able to navigate that particular situation.

This has brought to mind that old adage of "Be Prepared". Police cam YouTuber, Sergeant Curtis, always talks about officers being in the right shape for the fight of their lives. While I don't know that I'd typically hold my office-job having butt to the standard of a police officer, I do work in an 18th-floor office. Yes, I'm coming off a health issue, but I could be working harder to train up to recover and be better prepared to navigate a scenario like that in the future. 

Because my God, my whole body hurts.