Chuck
Well-known member
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2025
- Messages
- 86
For a long time, I figured we could get everybody out the door in ten minutes if we ever had to, then we actually tested it and found out there’s a big difference between having a plan and proving the plan works.
The first attempt took eighteen minutes, which was not exactly the result I was hoping for, somehow time just disappeared. So we started looking at where things broke down. The biggest problem was documents. Everybody knew where they were... sort of. Which is another way of saying nobody knew where they were when the clock was running.
The second problem was one of the dogs, who apparently believes getting into a vehicle is a violation of his constitutional rights. What should have taken thirty seconds turned into a full negotiation. After that, we rebuilt the process. We moved things around, simplified a few steps, assigned responsibilities and practiced it again.
The next run came in under ten minutes and what I learned wasn't that we needed more gear, we needed fewer assumptions. It's easy to sit around and talk about emergency plans. It's a lot harder to put a stopwatch on them and find out where reality disagrees with your theory. The funny thing is that every plan sounds great until a dog refuses to cooperate and somebody can't remember where they put the important paperwork.
Practice exposes those problems before they matter and that's the whole point. A plan you've tested is a plan. Everything else is just an idea you're hoping works.
The first attempt took eighteen minutes, which was not exactly the result I was hoping for, somehow time just disappeared. So we started looking at where things broke down. The biggest problem was documents. Everybody knew where they were... sort of. Which is another way of saying nobody knew where they were when the clock was running.
The second problem was one of the dogs, who apparently believes getting into a vehicle is a violation of his constitutional rights. What should have taken thirty seconds turned into a full negotiation. After that, we rebuilt the process. We moved things around, simplified a few steps, assigned responsibilities and practiced it again.
The next run came in under ten minutes and what I learned wasn't that we needed more gear, we needed fewer assumptions. It's easy to sit around and talk about emergency plans. It's a lot harder to put a stopwatch on them and find out where reality disagrees with your theory. The funny thing is that every plan sounds great until a dog refuses to cooperate and somebody can't remember where they put the important paperwork.
Practice exposes those problems before they matter and that's the whole point. A plan you've tested is a plan. Everything else is just an idea you're hoping works.
