Wednesday, February 01, 2006

My office is like "The Office"

Earlier this week, I was in a meeting at work that had me thinking I was on the show "The Office". I'll have to assume you've seen this show. I am a member of the Safety Team at my office. We are all CPR and First Aid certified and we are basically in charge during fire drills and the real thing. I've been begging for a sash, but no luck so far.

The Team is comprised of a sampling of the company. We've got an old lady, an overweight lady, a women my age who has a mean streak, some middle aged guys, and my friend and I who are pretty laid back. There were lots of different conversations, but one of the funniest was about panic buttons. Unbeknownst to me, there are several panic buttons in our building. Some are hardwired and some are ones you can carry around. We argued about the usefulness of them, and who should get the mobile buttons. If someone pushed one on the weekend when the office was locked up, could the police even get into the building. Would they break the door down? If they got in could they even find the button presser? The answer came in an important email the next day:

FYI - here's the update on panic buttons - police could get in building but wouldn't know where to go.

We also talked about our AED which is a shocker you use to get someone's heart going. One of the ladies got upset when someone mentioned we'd be taking it to our new building when we move because she would still be working in this building. We decided we'd all go up to the 4th floor to take a look at it. As we were all riding in the elevator together, my friend and I chuckled as we pictured the elevator breaking trapping the whole safety team inside while some disaster happens. After checking out the AED, our Dwight Shrute-like member showed how the blood pressure checking device worked on one of the ladies. He couldn't get it to work. After someone made a comment about it, he snapped back in a pissy voice saying they could give it a try. A couple of us had the wide-eyed look of "what the f was that all about".

At some point during our talk of AEDs, someone asked about how the other tenants in our building would be able to use it. The mean women said, "Who cares. They're not our responsibility."

After that we all took a tour of the mechanical room to see how to shut off the air handlers in case of a hazmat incident like a truck carrying tanks full of fart gas jackknifing on the expressway next to our building.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sweet.
Sounds like a good working group - healthy, patient and fun.

I think you should suggest buying remote controls for the mobile panic buttons so that you can activate them if you aren't close to a hard wired one and not close to a mobile one.

Plus, sashes would be cool, but I think armbands may command more authority. Pieces of flair!