Do you find yourself analyzing buildings you pass for defensibility during the zombie apocalypse?

I tend to have different worries.

I did with bullies. I wore fighting clothes and running shoes and I memorized the neighborhood for defencablity.

I am going to side with @janbb on this I tend to as well have other worries,I have learned to live with the zombies I have to drive amongst them everyday when at work.

Since its likelihood of happening is zero, this just doesn’t seem to make it on my list of priorities :)

So, no, I’m not scanning buildings for that purpose.

I don’t.

I analyze them for vulnerabilities for when WE ATTACK!

At this very moment, we have servers working at the CN Tower revolving restaurant. ;-p

I see layout and design choices.

Nah, I worry about the jehovah witness apocalypse.

@Adirondackwannabe How do you defend against that????????

If the zombies get to defy physics the way they did in the CGI animations in World War Z, then few buildings will be of much use.

@SQUEEKY2 Large packs of mad dogs. And some Englishmen

I do find myself checking for how many combines they have parked in the driveway.

@Cruiser Whoa, some seriously expensive metal.

I have. My husband and I (jokingly) have conversations about what we might do if it became evident an apocalypse was under way (zombie or otherwise).

@Earthbound_Misfit Well, what do you do if the apocalypse hits. You can’t go far without swimming. Then there’s the sharks. You’re hosed.

No, but I can tell you that after a head on collision I spent the next few months actively searching out escape routes as I drove. It really messes with your head when you realize that the only reason you are still here is pure luck.

There are islands off the coast of Australia. Some quite remote and with a small population. We have a plan…and an island picked out. :-)

@Earthbound_Misfit ”...an island picked out.”

Being the child of an architect and having a designing eye myself my thoughts are always along the lines of how fugly most buildings are. Fit for zombies for sure with their drab colors, dull physical presence and general lack of life affirming aestheticism. lol

I sometimes think about the apocalypse. It’s not necessarily a zombie one, just a run of the mill human one. We got rid of a lot of stock at work (I’m a librarian). As I was throwing out skip loads of journals since we have them in electronic format, I kept thinking that come the apocalypse, we would regret losing these paper versions. I’m pretty sure the internet won’t be working after an apocalypse.

Lol! I’ve seen that film @SmashTheState. We’d have to make sure we were ready for them when we arrived on the boat I guess. And as much as I love dogs, I think I’ll avoid taking one with me.

Do you have a plan ready @SmashTheState?

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, I assisted with a threat analysis of the buildings on the campus at the University. I now know where to go and hide in the event of an apocalypse. The big fault I found repeatedly is insufficiently restricted access to the roofs of the buildings, and in the case of our campus, tall ledges giving cover and concealment to whoever was on the roof. (also took the opportunity to hit a few golf balls off the roof of the buildings heh heh) When we gave our report and conducted a mock exercise with the local police department our concerns were addressed. Now I kinda wish I wasn’t as thorough because I now would have a rough time getting up on top of those buildings.

Heh heh, I do that all the time. I have no smartphone, so I must amuse myself while walking around or waiting in line, or like when I’m on the bus and shit.

It always goes a bit something as follows; if zombies happen right now, where am I, what do I do, and most importantly, where do I go? (these scenarios always begin with the assumption that I am not safe at all where I currently am) look at my surroundings and see where I can escape to. I don’t plan on fighting much, because I keep it as real as I can. (lol zombies real) I don’t know how to use firearms, and even if I did, I have none. This is Canada, they’re not easy to get. (not that I’ve tried, mind) If there’s a few zombies, I might fight them, if there’s something around I can use as a weapon, but I usually look at buildings and see what I can climb, or get inside of.
My problem is I always opt for higher ground. I would probably make it and survive for a while, but being stuck there, I’m bound to starve, get killed by people if there are some in the same place as me, or eventually the zombies get in and fuck me up.

This is when I’m outside. If I don’t know what the inside of the buildings around me are like, I stick to that kind of plan. If I’m inside and imagining this, I do much like you and see how safe the place could be, and if it’s decent to bolt myself in. Everything from barricading to food to lean water to health kits goes into consideration.
I still say ground level is dangerous, but you do need an escape route, which is decreased with higher ground. Well, it really depends on the building though…but that’s the fun of it. Every scenario ends up being pretty different.

I also figure out that this way, my apartment is a fucking death trap if zombies ever invade. Too many doors leading outside, flimsy apartment doors, lobby door with no lock, old, uncared for building.

And when I tire of the idea and scenarios, I see myself grabbing a car and heading for the sticks, preferably up in the mountains where it’s cold. (like we talked about in your medieval thread, cold would be great against zombies) I highly doubt myself able to survive in the wilderness though. I’m not Aragorn or a scout or anything. But if I learned anything from zombies, highly populated cities and towns are an eventual death trap.

Incidentally, I also play these same scenarios in my head, but with superhuman murderers like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees instead of zombies.

Also what the fuck mate, la jiggy jar jar doo? XD

@Earthbound_Misfit Absolutely! The key to surviving the zombie apocalypse, I think, is to understand that short-term and long-term survival require very different strategies. For example, you can survive 30 days without food with no permanent effects if you have to, but go three days without water and you’ll die horribly with muscle spasms so bad that you’ll break your own bones. Likewise, surviving the initial outbreak means deliberately going somewhere no one else wants to be to wait out the immediate chaos, while long term survival means being somewhere convenient and comfortable.

I am also keeping a mental list of people I think will be both useful and stable for holing up with and watching my back. I don’t care how many survival skills you have if you’re going to flip out and turn into Lord Humungus on me when things fall apart.

@Symbeline In the long term you need to think about places which will allow you to do sorties against the zombies. Having hundreds of thousands or millions of zombies milling around you will eventually result in death. There’s just too many variables involved and eventually you’ll make a mistake. You need to find a place where you can kill huge numbers of zombies and clear their bodies. This means finding a place where you can not only reliably put a spear through zombies’ heads again and again and again from a location of total safety, but also be able to burn the bodies without setting yourself, your base, or the entire surrounding neighbourhood on fire. Practically speaking, that means a secure location surrounded by a large, completely empty parking lot. Government offices, hotels, and car dealerships come to mind, provided you can clear the cars away, but those are going to be hard to secure given the number of windows.

La Jiggy Jar Jar Doo

I don’t care how many survival skills you have if you’re going to flip out and turn into Lord Humungus on me when things fall apart.

And that’s one of the parts about long term survival that would worry me the most. Assuming I have nerves of steel and never fall apart, I don’t want my entourage doing what people end up doing in most zombie movies. And in real life, people crumbling would probably occur much earlier than in movies. Incidentally I’m wondering just how quickly one’s mind would snap if they saw zombies…I know people are resilient and can adapt to many weird things, but zombies would probably create some major cases of PTSD if one survived it.

Thus why I would rather opt for short term holding up and then fucking off to live like a hermit in a forest, although most of my scenarios are long term ones. And for what you describe, killing zombies and disposing of them, you need manpower for this, I can’t do all that shit on my own. Double edged sword…

We got this, man! We got this by the ass!
-Roger DeMarco