Reader Eve’s Hubby sent me this email and I think it is worth sharing.
Something occurred to me recently that I felt was worth sharing, concerning all safety systems but especially in cars.
With the tethering cable on my car safe, I’ve gotten used to pulling it out only a certain length to deposit my pistol. The last time that I went to put it in, I noticed I pulled it out much farther than usual, and I was pretty shocked to find that the cable was out of the safe’s cable socket. I didn’t know how it had actually been like that, but I quickly corrected it and tested to make sure it was still tied to the other side. A quick test ensured it was as secure as it could be.
What it brought to my mind is that security systems need regular inspections and testing, no matter how simple they are. Imagine if I hadn’t noticed the cable wasn’t attached and some burglar was feeling lucky with my car. That small roadbump in the cable would have been missing and no doubt a would-be thief would snatch it up quickly.
Do we schedule ant type of routine maintenance check with our safety items? When was the last time you checked your box or your fire extinguishers or the alarms? When was the last time you checked ALL your defensive guns? Have you given your EDC gun a full clean up and oiling lately? It does not matter if you shot it or not, guns attract crap.
Have you checked your first aid kit for expired/missing items? Frigging gnomes steal stuff. Make sure the tourniquets are still there.
Maybe a day every 2-3 weeks we do a quick walk-through and make sure things are copacetic. It does not cost much but a little time and it does not have to be all at once.
Give it a thought.
I was sand blasting bike parts with Black Beauty FINE sand. Had my Colt 1911 in a IWB holster. When I got home that night I couldnt move the slide at all. It was full of sand. Had to soak it overnight and carefully dissassemble( live round in chamber) and clean the whole gun. Good post! I clean and oil carry guns once a week.
Every time the clocks get changed, I replace batteries in the smoke/CO detectors, and cycle every circuit breaker in the house (including the main). Check the first aid kits as well.
However, good point. I am now checking other security, safety systems, and doing so more often. Five minutes a month can be the difference between life and death.
I’m curious about the cable coming loose. A tethering cable for a safe should be attached to the box very strongly; if it comes loose in use that suggests either a design error, a manufacturing error, or improper installation.
More in general, if something is wrong, just fixing it (except as an immediate workaround) isn’t the whole job; the rest of the job is to find out why it went wrong and whether it could happen again, and if so doing something about that.
Many of the lock boxes for in the car and travel have a slot in the side of the box to take the locking cable.
You open the box, take out the cable, loop it around something sturdy, feed the line back though the loop that is affixed to the end, you take the loose end and feed it down into the slot.
When you close the box it is firmly attached but you can undo it is you want to take the box with you.
It is a design feature.
Unfortunately, some of the slots are a little loose and the cable will pop out when you open the box.
They say the same thing about computer backups. If you don’t test your backups then you don’t have any.
Oh shit, good point
Is once tasked with writing the disaster recovery plan for a computer installation on a military post. The effort first paragraph started with:
Assume that multiple grenades have gone off in the disk farm and onsite tape stacks. The damaged equipment has been removed and replaced…
The customers and managers were happily impressed with the amount of detail in the plan.
My backup plans for family and clients are just as complete.
Yup. My work involves data replication machinery, and that sort of discussion is all over. I like to mention that you choose your assumptions: do you worry about the sprinklers destroying the room? A fire destroying the whole building? An earthquake leveling the city? Depending on assumptions you plan your backups differently.
The bit about “grenades” reminds me of a conversation about 30 years ago about fault tolerant networks. To me at the time (working for DEC) that means worrying about switches that break. To the other person, who worked for the Navy, it meant thinking about what happens to the on-board networks in battle. For him “faults” were the result of enemy action, not random events. It meant doing things like running half the wires on the port side and half on the starboard side, and designing things so it would still work if a torpedo takes out the entire port side network.
This is where smartphones can come through for us. Set a reminder for every interval to check this, that, whatever your setup is.
That way there’s no excuse to forget.
Noting of course that “swiped and dismissed because I’m busy right now” doesn’t count as doing the check… 🙂