Is your organization prepared for an attack by zombies?
Forget swine flu: The University of Florida is ready in case its employees become flesh-eating zombies. A University of Florida e-Learning Support Services Web site has a a zombie attack plan posted among similar disaster preparation exercises for a hurricane and disease pandemic.
The apparent joke is played straight, including medical information on “zombieism” and a form allowing UF employees to explain why they killed infected co-workers.
“The purpose of this exercise is to discern appropriate strategies for responding to a zombie attack and/or infection that might affect the University of Florida campus.” Really.
The zombie attack plan includes footnotes referring to zombie movies such as “Night of the Living Dead” and “28 Days Later” as documentaries. It also has some helpful tips:
- Signs of a possible zombie include “Identification of difficult to kill, flesh-eating perpetrators” and “Documentation of lots of strange moaning.”
- Contrary to myth, “garlic will not stop true zombies, only vampires; and zombies do come out during the day, though they are most active a night because they typically do not like sunlight.”
The “infected co-worker dispatch form” is the best part, including a place to list the co-worker’s symptoms such as “references to wanting to eat brains” and “lack of rational thought (this can cause problems confusing zombies with managers).”
A composite photo illustration of zombies from the new movie "Zombieland" and Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.
At the end, employees must note whether housekeeping was notified to clean up the dead zombie and human resources has been told to stop salary payments to the zombie and its victims.
The full story on the plan’s author and why he wrote it can be found here.
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All seriousness aside (as Steve Allen used to say), a continuity exercise doesn’t have to be based on a boring (or even plausible) scenario to be effective.
My favorite exercise scenario years ago was based on Tribbles. Tribbles are fictional animals in the Star Trek universe who first appeared in the episode titled “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
The scenario involved Tribbles occupying a data center and growing exponentially. The exercise participants were having so much fun – and actually doing a great job of dealing with contingencies – that they simply wouldn’t stop. A one-hour exercise ran over seven hours (and yes, they dealt with all of the Tribbles before it was over! Have you ever seen those truck-mounted vacuums used for cleaning out storm drains?).
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An unexercised contingency plan could be worse than no plan at all!
Be sure to read Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan, Philip Jan Rothstein, FBCI, Editor – the only book on this subject – for valuable tips, techniques and insights. And no, this book doesn’t mention Zombies – or Tribbles. Maybe the next edition…
Tags: exercise, scenarios, scripts, test, university of florida, zombies
