Hello,
If you’re reading this, it’s because you’ve come to realize that the world is a little unsafe and dangerous. Maybe it’s because you had a guy crawling through the vents on your building, shooting and hurting. Maybe you had zombies exploiting the futuristic features. Maybe you had safety features that were anything but.
Either way, we have some tips to creating a building that is a little safer, based on some of the things we’ve all seen in cinema, television, and video games.
-A Small Vent is a Happy Vent 🙂
There is really no excuse for having man-size vents in your building. For starters, it makes no sense from a building standpoint. Think about air as a liquid. There is a certain amount of pressure required to push liquid through a hose. A large hose, more pressure. A small hose, less pressure. Imagine holding a hose, then imagine putting your thumb over the end and blocking most of it. More pressure!
However, if you ARE going to have man-size vents, try and keep the design from including any sort of fan that might chop a person to pieces. Or spikes of some kind. That’s a HUGE liability issue. You wouldn’t build a hallway with a rug covering a pit of punji sticks, so don’t build a man-sized vent that someone might walk into.
Also, don’t mistake the term “man size vent” for meaning large enough for a man. Please also do not make them large enough for a small child. Child vents only lead to child escapees, which only lead to children joining a group of hardened space marines, which only leads to misery.
-Ammo Clips All Over? Why Not? 🙂
Yeah, it sounds crazy. Just bullets all over the damn place? But think about it. These building takeover guys always bring their own bullets. The only guys who run out are the good guys. Then you have two lousy bullets to take down a whole helicopter.
Just stash them all over. Break room, water cooler, copy machine feeder tray. Couldn’t hurt.
Also, feel free to include other survival supplies such as booze, a spare pair of shoes, and a single cigarette.
-Computerization is Only as Good as Its Creepy Little Girl Avatar 🙂
We all love the idea of shouting into the air, “Darlene, get me the stats on the building!” and having a weird, 19th century little girl give us the stats we asked for. However, there are a lot of issues with this, and we’d ask that you make a few changes.
One, make it very easy to shut down this system. Think about your laptop. You can easily shut it down the right way, or unplug it and let it run out of power, or smash it in half if there’s an emergency. If your building-wide system that controls EVERYTHING is more difficult to shut down than a laptop, there’s a problem.
Also, keep in mind that something that may seem pleasant at 3 PM with bright lighting and all your work chums around can be terribly creepy when it is dark and monsters are surrounding the building. So consider going with a friendly avatar as opposed to what is basically a pixellated ghost. For your convenience, we’ve provided some friendly options online, including Wall-E from the motion picture Wall-E, the Jeff Garland character from the motion picture Wall-E, and the dad who was sitting next to his daughter in the row in front of me when I saw Wall-E in the theater. He seemed like a super good dad, really involved but not without boundaries.