only about 2 fire extinguishers on the entire top floor


ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO STAY IN THAT COMPANY ??
For God sake, I had a confrontation with management on issues less serious than yours. If I were you, I will NOT sneak in a tire iron or pry bar. The stuff in the basement is brought where it is needed or else ! Mangers and bosses won't be there with you when you face a disaster.

The same applies to your friends or colleagues. I mean they may "freak out" seeing a tire iron and not freak out for being locked up ? We are in a bizzare world !


Edited to add :

If you want the job badly and don't want to risk losing it, then at least ask them to transfer you to the ground floor.

LOL, I am ABSOLUTELY positive I want to keep that job. Especially nowadays with such gloomy times ahead.

I want to be prepared but I still try to be realistic. I mean, there is a very small chance that something will go wrong at my workplace. Even less chance of anything happening to me or while I'm there. But losing my job would be a 100% surefire way to put me in an extremely difficult situation, financially and otherwise. Even more so because I have a very specialized profession - I'm just really happy that I got a nearly perfect job and would like to keep it if at all possible.

Frankly, none of my colleagues would freak out seeing a tire iron in my office, probably because I don't think anybody knows what it's used for. Also, it doesn't have such a bad rep around here, apparently it's not a common improvised weapon in the streets so there is little if any negative connotation. And being the resident mechanical guy whenever the janitor isn't available I've been known to always keep some tools at hand for fixing whatever might need fixing so that would be easy to explain. But a crowbar would be a different story in a high security place like ours (wouldn't want to speak about it too much publicly but a bank would be a pretty close analogy).

I will definitely try to persuade the folks in charge to take our safety a bit more seriously but it will take time. Transferring to the ground floor is not an option - there is a different department down there.

I was thinking about finding some details about that office fire that I mentioned, where people were trapped in the stairwell and died because they couldn't get out of the smoke-filled stairwell. It was a 2003 fire in the Cook County Administration Building in Chicago where six employees died in the stairwell. Here's a somewhat lengthy piece on that fire. If you skip to the second paragraph and the third from the bottom paragraph, you'll see a description of what some of these poor souls went through, including their interaction with emergency services. I mean, these folks talked to 911 and even ran into fire fighters in the stairwell and they still died. This tragedy is so FUBAR on many levels.

I work in NYC and I like your kit (except the tire iron).

I wear a computer backpack and the main things I carry - all the time - are a flashlight, a bandanna, a liter of water in a metal bottle, a leatherman tool, some granola, a 4" Crescent Wrench, some flat duct tape, a small FAK, a scanner radio, some paracord (like 25'), an AA flashlight and a small prybar. The rest of the must-haves we have in the office.

I agree, I did some remodeling in an office in Southern Cal and the contractors were very sensitive to the key card issue- they insisted we make some design changes to avoid what they referred to as "man traps". And all exits required panic bars, etc. Really drove up the cost of my little project but I'm glad they knew their biz......

But you got me thinkin'- I haven't checked out my new offices, and I'm on the third floor......

Looks like a fire drill tomorrow!