Ahem.

UPDATE: Rendered moot in the same day! I am both impressed and grateful for our administration’s responsiveness, even as I feel somewhat guilty for putting them on blast (without warning). I wrote this on a day I was frustrated and then scheduled it and then pulled it (or so I thought), thinking that I should send some notice upstairs first. I guess I my effort to de-schedule it was inept, though, and I was somewhat surprised to find it posted today. I’m glad the manual is under review, but I am sorry that I didn’t give our hard-working administrators a chance to do something about it  before turning it into a public spectacle. That was my bad. Thanks to Don and company for the fast response.

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Is anyone else troubled by the fact that there are no instructions for what to do in the case of a lock-down in our Emergency  Manual and that somewhere around half of the people identified as having some sort of responsibility are no longer employed at the college and that the Emergency Manuals might be some of the least user friendly documents produced by the college (at least until the new “Pathways” are released), which is saying something?

(Poor Dean Blair–his fellow escalator monitors are Cecilia Lopez, Anna Blum, and John Metoyer (p. 33). Not only that, but apparently John Wozniak is our Emergency Director!)

I know, I know…the names aren’t really that important (and, truthfully, I don’t really care about that; I’m just playing). During the last fire drill, there were plenty of monitors and help for clearing out the building; everything seemed to be working smoothly and well, for evacuations anyway. I don’t know how the “Safe Haven” card things are supposed to work for anything other than drills. I taped mine up near my door on the Tuesday before the drill and it was gone by Thursday. A few people have them up in their office windows, probably having interpreted their meaning according to the broader social and K-12 usage of the term. I just don’t see how it would all work. Maybe I’m dense.

I continue to think that the biggest dangers and threats any of us might face, as identified in a Faculty Council survey a couple of years ago, continue to exist, largely unaddressed, but I also know that a certain amount of risk is inevitable and that our risk for something awful happening is (knock on wood) low. Still, I have printed out and laminated this sign for posting in the classes that I’m teaching in. I won’t be able to lock my door from the inside on Thursday for this drill, but at least with the new biometrics system, they’ll have a way of identifying me if something goes really wrong some day.

So we’ve got that going for us. Which is nice.