Safety unbound

No politics today so all those who think Joseph Muscat is our smiling, smirking saviour will have to wait for another instalment of my series-in-gestation of how I switched and am now besotted by him and his merry Muscateers.

Today it’s time to be serious. Very serious.

Recently I attended a seminar on security. All about how we need to close our doors, lock with a secret code which we are advised to change every few seconds, build a wall around our house and, if physically possible, have a moat installed. Finally, if we can have an electronic wire which stuns any passerby who even dares look at the door and then proceeds to frazzle his brain, I can go out for a walk and come back home safe and sound.

As all you readers have realised, the seminar was actually about security of our cyber abode and all the above was somewhat a metaphor. The world of passwords, firewalls, spam, phishing and other stranger stuff was talked about, filters dissected and warnings galore about malware and Trojans bandied about. It was like going on my own electronic Odyssey. It was all very gripping—I promise I really enjoyed it though I admit to being scared beyond belief—and I left promising myself to go through my cyber-world of security and be very very wary about all these horrid men and women who are dying to hack into me and discover all my innermost secrets and cash.

I left the seminar a new man—I started believing in super-security and I felt the mantra of “yes it can happen to me” deep in my soul. Off I left to go straight to my IT expert to get myself organised and shielded from enemies as nefarious as Al Qaeda, the CIA and everyone else in the world.

As I was going out I noticed a sign saying fire exit. I don’t usually do this but the conference turned me into a snoop so I followed the signs and lo and behold the exit was partially barred by a skip. I actually tried walking out of the fire exit and had to manoeuvre and turn—not too easy for a man my age, my girth and my lack of dexterity. When I managed, after a few long seconds, I realised that behind the skip, was another great hurdle to overcome. There were cars parked in all sorts of ways which made walking, let alone a crowd running, hardly possible.

Now let’s imagine a scenario where a fire had broken out. I’d have joined a few other shrieking men and women trying hard to get out of the building. A skip and cars in front of us would have hampered us and made us lose precious time. A stampeding crowd of a few, let alone of hundreds if not thousands, is the last thing I would have relished.

As the speaker at the seminar said, it could have been us, and yet in this country we have such a strange nonchalant way of looking at security and safety. Thankfully it’s because few fires actually happen. But they are known to have happened and there can be other frightening things that cause panic and the need for mass exits—an earthquake or some madman chasing us all with a machete ready to hack us to kingdom come.

Oh, and by the way, the place in question actually had a very bad fire one day back in time.

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