Continued from here.

So the armed shooter event is happening tomorrow and...I'm nervous about it. Yes, I know I'm not actually getting shot--though it's questionable at the moment as to whether or not actual anything will get fired AT us, I'm not putting it past them when they fired a blank or whatever at the previous meeting. But...well, how thrilled would you be about having to do this sort of drill?

I have been having nightmares about it, albeit on the weird side, like "as we're waiting to be shot at, this guy is snuggling up to me except he thinks I'm my cousin, huh?" and generally being jittery about the whole thing. But I especially got jittery when they sent out the list about it.

I'll try to explain without getting too specific: we're moving offices next month and the new building has a lot more security concerns than this one (i.e. it's the financial offices building), so they're making us do this armed shooter demo without having actually moved in yet. This does not seem particularly reasonable to me when according to the paperwork, this is to make sure that we know how to practice running, hiding, and fighting in our own space--and uh, we're literally not going to be able to do that. We are being loaned out to other offices for this demonstration. And....I saw that I am going to be on one of the front counter offices on the first floor, literally the first one that a shooter would go for. All of us that have to serve the public are being put in a situation like that, of course. Meanwhile, all the managers are just being sent up to some meeting room where all they'll probably have to do is duck under a table. So I am...unthrilled by this even more. Like to the point of pondering a last minute uh, emergency that means I somehow can't make it to this special event. Because even if it's technically safe, I don't really want to be wigged out all day afterwards, especially when I have to serve later.

Anyway, I went to writer's group tonight and they had some interesting perspectives on this. One person mostly voted for "call in sick," though she suggested at one point she'd go in for me. I was all hey, we're around the same height, blondish, if we put you in a dress...to which she was all NO DRESS and I was all eh, actually I would wear pants to such a thing anyway really. My friend Melinda, a former (at the moment, she's "taking a year off") teacher, said she's had to do shooting lockdown drills with kindergarteners before. She said she had to tell the kids some kind of "big bad wolf is after us" sort of story and they just hid in the dark while people banged on the doors. Which is ridiculous because uh, they could just break in or shoot the doors, etc. Fun times. Then Dale told me about the time he got a gun pointed at him. Basically he was all, "you should go to this to get a good story out of it." Much as I'm not thrilled at being in a profession where I'm likely to die (though again, going to the movies is just as bad now), I kind of agree with this sort of logic. Like I'm picturing myself going to improv class tomorrow and being all, "Well, normally I could give a monologue about getting shot at, but I called in sick" and then Brian laughing at me. Deservedly so.

Then I had to go home and call Mom and hoo boy, was she ticking me off being Positive! about this. As in, she actually said to me, "You should be grateful for the opportunity! Aren't you grateful about ANYTHING?" To which I was basically growling. I am so my father's daughter and super optimism gets on my damn nerves. She also told me this long, drawn out story that was either about a bank robbery or scamming a bank or something...I never did figure out exactly what was going on, unfortunately, because despite the subject matter she was making it dull as hell. I kept telling her that talking to her WAS NOT HELPING. Sigh.

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