Avoiding Emergency Preparedness
Preparing for emergencies takes time, effort, and money. Why bother? You and your coworkers have better things to do, such as deleting e-mails and planning holiday parties. You can’t neglect these tasks. To complete them, you should avoid disaster planning as much as possible. But this can be difficult. To thwart emergency preparedness planning, follow these commonsensical steps.
The How-To Guide

Inspired by government propaganda, employees may demand fire drills. Instead of celebrating staff birthdays in your cafeteria, they may be tempted to take first aid courses and learn how to use fire extinguishers. They might store flashlights in their desks. They might even start to back up their data. There could be no end to such activities unless you stop them. But how?
- Cancel the appointment and training of your organization’s fire wardens.
- Postpone fire drills until nobody remembers when the last one took place.
- Refuse to schedule and pay for first aid courses. Instead, you should encourage employees to take courses in gluten-free cooking, roller-skating, and toenail maintenance. Offer to pay for these in support of professional development.
- Refuse to distribute emergency preparedness literature such as posters, pamphlets, and booklets to employees. If you catch employees reviewing a website that covers emergency related topics, tell them to delete unwanted e-mails instead. Or they could create an inventory of the organization’s party decorations.
- Remind everyone to keep their weak passwords for the foreseeable future and to stop backing up vital data, which is a waste of time. Remember that all data is “backed up on the network” (even though it isn’t).
- Avoid consultants. If your organization hires a consultant to develop your company’s emergency preparedness plan, be sure to take the plan and lose it on your network or store the hardcopy in a “dead storage” cabinet. Peel off labels on any three-ring binders that contain preparedness information to ensure that what’s lost, stays lost.
- Ignore your Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) Committee. Schedule their next meeting a year or two from now, then bribe the Committee chair with gluten-free doughnuts to avoid making any meeting arrangements. Above all, do not allow the Committee or anyone else in your organization to schedule training sessions. Tell anyone who challenges these measures to concentrate on plans for your organization’s summer picnic.
- Remember that all emergencies happen elsewhere. Remind everyone that earthquakes destroy cities in California and Asia, and that heat waves bake communities in South America and the Middle East. Remind yourself that the local fire department can extinguish any blaze in your building before it gets uncomfortably smoky or hot.
- Stop talking about epidemics and pandemics. Covid is gone, never to return. File your face masks in dead storage.
These measures have proven effective in countless organizations, and should work well in yours. You’ll save time, money, and effort that you can use to support otherwise worthwhile endeavours.
If you’d like to comment on this article or explore these ideas further, contact me at guy.
This article was published in the
September 2022
edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:9 Issue:4
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