Tonight, tropical storms Cindy and Dennis (which is forecasted to become a category 3 hurricane before landfall) are bearing down on the southeastern United States. Since moving to North Carolina, I’ve had to learn to deal with heavy rains, hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms. I’ve stood at my front window during Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and watched the siding of our apartment building blow past me. I’ve had a tornado form in front of me while driving home from work. Ice storms have caused power outages that have lasted over a week at a time. Yet, even on days like these, I’m expected to get to work, sometimes navigating around automobile accidents, downed power lines, and fallen trees. When there, I’m expected to perform as usual. So how does one get there and still perform, although mother nature is trying her best to stop you? Preparation is the key.
Just like the Red Cross has disaster preparedness kits for home and highway use, if we have a productivity disaster kit, staying productive in the face of adversity can be accomplished. Here are a few items of the items that I keep handy and count on when I can’t count on anything else:
Transportation
- 4–Wheel Drive Vehicle – We keep one vehicle that can handle the ugly weather when staying home is not an option. I depend on a Nissan Xterra when I absolutely have to get there.
- Emergency Car Kit – Blanket, extra coat, chains, flares, shovel, sand, flashlight, etc.
- Traction Shoes – Since I deal with more ice than snow, I slip these over my shoes and I can walk across ice as if it wasn’t even there.
Communication
- Cell Phone – One is my personal phone. Another is provided by my employer. In addition, we have one more Nextel that is reserved for emergency use only. If impending bad weather is close or evacuation necessary, I forward business phones to the cells, which, for me, have been more reliable when lines go down.
- Blackberry – No power at work means no computer, which means no email. My Blackberry receives all emails and provides me a way to send as well.
- Notification.com – Although I often lose power at work, I, somehow, never lose it at home. Therefore, I have use of my computer at home. Notification.com allows me to contact my personnel (over 100) in a matter of five minutes. This allows me to tell the staff to not come in, to come in late after the weather has moved through, or to give any other instructions. Each staff member’s home phone and cell phone rings simultaneously. An email is also sent to their email accounts automatically. My staff is the most important thing I can look after so this is the first thing I do when faced with a weather-related emergency.
- Radio – A battery-powered radio that picks up local radio stations, local broadcast TV stations, and the weather frequencies is a must. Mine is small enough to keep in my briefcase everyday.
- Scanner – On severe weather days, I can keep track of fallen power lines and trees.
Productivity
- Laptop – A fully charged laptop gives me a good five hours of computing time. It’s loaded with all the programs that I have on my desktop computer.
- Jumpdrive – I save all documents to a 1 Gig Jumpdrive as standard operating procedure. This allows me to have access to my documents and project materials at home as well as at work. This also allows me to plug it into the laptop when my desktop computer is down, making me good to go even with no power.
What equipment, materials, or strategies to you use to keep you productive on those days when you must go to work even though common sense tells you to stay in bed due to negative situations outside your control?
Resources
I have deleted the comment spam that had been posted here. Especially after Hurricane Katrina and its devastation, it was especially cruel to hype emergency kits by using the fears after that storm. AAARRRRGGGGHHH!
--Bert
Posted by: MSI | September 09, 2005 at 03:19 PM
Spammers suck. They hit my blog too.
Posted by: Garrett Fitzgerald | September 09, 2005 at 03:54 PM