![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Day 10
We lost another one today. MC never showed up to work today, and isn't answering his phone, either cell or land line. Cell phones are iffy anyway, ever since the main server rooms at Bell Mobility and Rogers Wireless were compromised last week: no one to maintain the service properly anymore, after all. We figure MC must have run into trouble either on the way home, or maybe on the way in this morning. He mentioned he'd been having trouble staying awake at the wheel lately, what with all the overtime we're pulling here. And we thought we were short-staffed *before* the outbreak.
Land lines are still okay, which just goes to show that those who said all along that analog was more reliable than digital were absolutely right. We're mostly using dial-up at work these days, when we need to. Everything else is slowly going back to paper, radio transmissions, and analog. We're all a little surprised at how easily (maybe I should say "easily") we're transitioning back to the old way of doing things, but I guess it's understandable. We've stopped taking care of all the admin. stuff that took up so much of our time, and now, like all the other emergency services in town, we're just taking it one step at a time, putting out fires as we can, both real and metaphorical.
Most of the rioting and looting is dying down. The main danger lies in the commercial areas, where the disease (or whatever it is) spread like wildfire within a day or so of the initial outbreak. Shopping malls and large grocery stores are still thoroughly infested, and we just don't have the manpower to deal with it these days. It gives me a bad taste in my mouth to know that we just barricaded all those people inside, sometimes without checking for survivors. I think the theory was that any survivors were already compromised beyond salvation. History will judge whether or not we were right, I guess.
The rest of us are getting by as best we can. First responders were hard hit, initially, since we didn't know what we were getting into. We're short of people, but everyone up to and including senior officers are all pitching in, which means an extra 500 or so police officers out there, which is both a good and a bad thing. It's a good thing because we need as many people helping as we can get, and a bad thing because every time we lose someone it's like a sucker-punch to the gut. In a perverse way, it's kind of gratifying to finally be providing real help to the citizens here, instead of mostly administrative support. It's not like we need to do background checks or issue warrants in this situation, after all, or even run license plates. Just straight dispatching. Seven months ago I was told when I took this job that I would be lucky to get one real emergency call a year: 911 is supposed to take care of that in Québec, not the RCMP. Federal jurisdiction only. Hah. Truth be told, I don't think any of us were expecting zombies, no matter the jokes about outbreaks that were so common before. No one's joking now.
Op Sec at home is still pretty good. We've managed to build up the fence around the garden enough that nothing can get in, at least for now. Against all odds, the vegetable garden itself is still intact, which means that we'll have food for the summer, at least. After that, we're hoping that enough order will have been restored that we can get in some food shipments. Maybe when some of the smaller grocery stores have been cleared we'll be able to re-stock some of the non-perishable stuff we've been going through. Thank goodness I have the good fortune to live in the same building as people who believed in preparedness: between the three of us, we're okay for at least the forseeable future. Others haven't been as lucky.
In the interests of keeping "safe," I've been using one of the Communauto cars for almost all of my travel. It's not like anyone's keeping track of billing or anything like that, and I think many of their vehicles must be irretrievably lost or damaged by now. Weirdly enough, it gives me some comfort to maintain my mileage logs on the car, just as though I were still a member in good standing. I suppose it's a psychological defense mechanism, something that lets me hope that someday, perhaps soon, we'll be able to restore some kind of order, and that everyone will be accountable for their actions during the time of chaos.
The fact that I'm one of the lucky ones, that I live and work in places that, especially so close to downtown, are still marginally "safe," doesn't do very much to make me feel better, though, amidst all this destruction. I worry about my friends in other parts of the country, with whom I lost contact days ago, about my family and friends abroad, whom I may never see again even if things do return to some semblance of normal.
For now, I try not to think too far ahead. I can't afford to take it "one day at a time," the way they tell us to. What's left of the government and the news services, that is. "One day at a time," guarantees that, at some point, we will run out of food and gas, or water, or something equally as important, and we won't have seen it coming. So we're concentrating on small-ish units of time: days, weeks, a couple of months. Thinking further ahead than that is risky and often counter-productive. It leads to questions like: "What if it never gets any better?" or "What if it gets even worse?"
So I try not to think about it. I do my job, I try to help where I can. We have a paper list of known casualties up on one of the walls, from where we removed a bunch of filing cabinets.
I think that soon we're going to need to clear another wall.
Land lines are still okay, which just goes to show that those who said all along that analog was more reliable than digital were absolutely right. We're mostly using dial-up at work these days, when we need to. Everything else is slowly going back to paper, radio transmissions, and analog. We're all a little surprised at how easily (maybe I should say "easily") we're transitioning back to the old way of doing things, but I guess it's understandable. We've stopped taking care of all the admin. stuff that took up so much of our time, and now, like all the other emergency services in town, we're just taking it one step at a time, putting out fires as we can, both real and metaphorical.
Most of the rioting and looting is dying down. The main danger lies in the commercial areas, where the disease (or whatever it is) spread like wildfire within a day or so of the initial outbreak. Shopping malls and large grocery stores are still thoroughly infested, and we just don't have the manpower to deal with it these days. It gives me a bad taste in my mouth to know that we just barricaded all those people inside, sometimes without checking for survivors. I think the theory was that any survivors were already compromised beyond salvation. History will judge whether or not we were right, I guess.
The rest of us are getting by as best we can. First responders were hard hit, initially, since we didn't know what we were getting into. We're short of people, but everyone up to and including senior officers are all pitching in, which means an extra 500 or so police officers out there, which is both a good and a bad thing. It's a good thing because we need as many people helping as we can get, and a bad thing because every time we lose someone it's like a sucker-punch to the gut. In a perverse way, it's kind of gratifying to finally be providing real help to the citizens here, instead of mostly administrative support. It's not like we need to do background checks or issue warrants in this situation, after all, or even run license plates. Just straight dispatching. Seven months ago I was told when I took this job that I would be lucky to get one real emergency call a year: 911 is supposed to take care of that in Québec, not the RCMP. Federal jurisdiction only. Hah. Truth be told, I don't think any of us were expecting zombies, no matter the jokes about outbreaks that were so common before. No one's joking now.
Op Sec at home is still pretty good. We've managed to build up the fence around the garden enough that nothing can get in, at least for now. Against all odds, the vegetable garden itself is still intact, which means that we'll have food for the summer, at least. After that, we're hoping that enough order will have been restored that we can get in some food shipments. Maybe when some of the smaller grocery stores have been cleared we'll be able to re-stock some of the non-perishable stuff we've been going through. Thank goodness I have the good fortune to live in the same building as people who believed in preparedness: between the three of us, we're okay for at least the forseeable future. Others haven't been as lucky.
In the interests of keeping "safe," I've been using one of the Communauto cars for almost all of my travel. It's not like anyone's keeping track of billing or anything like that, and I think many of their vehicles must be irretrievably lost or damaged by now. Weirdly enough, it gives me some comfort to maintain my mileage logs on the car, just as though I were still a member in good standing. I suppose it's a psychological defense mechanism, something that lets me hope that someday, perhaps soon, we'll be able to restore some kind of order, and that everyone will be accountable for their actions during the time of chaos.
The fact that I'm one of the lucky ones, that I live and work in places that, especially so close to downtown, are still marginally "safe," doesn't do very much to make me feel better, though, amidst all this destruction. I worry about my friends in other parts of the country, with whom I lost contact days ago, about my family and friends abroad, whom I may never see again even if things do return to some semblance of normal.
For now, I try not to think too far ahead. I can't afford to take it "one day at a time," the way they tell us to. What's left of the government and the news services, that is. "One day at a time," guarantees that, at some point, we will run out of food and gas, or water, or something equally as important, and we won't have seen it coming. So we're concentrating on small-ish units of time: days, weeks, a couple of months. Thinking further ahead than that is risky and often counter-productive. It leads to questions like: "What if it never gets any better?" or "What if it gets even worse?"
So I try not to think about it. I do my job, I try to help where I can. We have a paper list of known casualties up on one of the walls, from where we removed a bunch of filing cabinets.
I think that soon we're going to need to clear another wall.
no subject
no subject
~Jeff and Paze
no subject
It's Blog Like It's The End Of The World Day. Sorry for the confusion, although I'm very glad my "post" was realistic enough to make people err on the side of "WTF?"
With any luck it wasn't *too* Orson Welles-ish.
no subject
It's Blog Like It's The End Of The World Day. :)
Sorry for the confusion. I keep missing Rabbit Hole Day, but I was determined not to miss this one.