Becoming paranoid or cautious?

The world is supposed to end this Friday, which kind of sucks, since we’ll be missing the weekend. Why couldn’t the world end on the following Monday? Although to be honest, that Monday is Christmas Eve and it’s only half a day at work, which means that everybody will be in holiday spirit and not much work will be done. Apart from very emergency issues, the rest of the day will be spent chatting, gossiping and mindlessly browsing the internet. I think there will be a Christmas party for the employees’ children in the mess room, but I’ll try to stay far away from that one. Then it’s Christmas. Can the world end at the end of next week?

To be honest, I don’t think the world will end. Maybe, I’m being too selfish believing that I will not die this Friday, or maybe too optimistic. In any case, I have planned to do my Christmas food shopping late this Friday to try to avoid the weekend hordes of panicking consumers. My local big supermarket is open till midnight, which is very convenient. I’ll go home, have dinner and later that night, we’ll get ready and instead of going to a bar, we’ll go food shopping. On Christmas day, it’s going to be the two of us, so food shopping will be somewhat easy, even if we will stuff ourselves with food, as expected.

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about is ‘prepping’. According to the Google dictionary, prepping is ‘preparing oneself for an event’. During these modern times, prepping has a new meaning and it concerns people getting ready for an apocalyptic event, i.e. the end of the world. There are some people really serious / fanatical about it. They believe that a disaster of that proportion will soon happen, whether it is a zombie attack or a civil outbreak or a spreading killing virus, and they have made preparations. They have escape routes from their houses, evacuation packed bags with necessities, a destination where they believe they can isolate and support themselves for weeks, even months, and they train themselves in first aid, hunting and various other similar self-preservation skills.

My self-preservation skills are almost non-existent. Even in the most user friendly forest, I wouldn’t know how to survive. OK, maybe I would try to find a water source and some shelter for the night. But that’s it. I was never a boy scout and I don’t think I would be able to light a fire without a lighter. If the zombies came, I would be one of the first to go. To be frank about it, that wouldn’t be a very bad thing though. Who wants to live in a post-apocalyptic world anyway? Have you read the ‘World War Z’?

However, some recent events made me thinking. Without taking the situation too far, wouldn’t be a good idea to be somewhat prepared? I’m not talking about the zombies or aliens coming. I’m talking about more real everyday stuff. For example, if a natural disaster occurred, like hurricane Sandy that left so many people without electricity for days, do I have the proper equipment at home to sustain myself for these days? Do you?

So, I made a mental list of things needed. In case the electrical supply was down, the supermarkets remained closed for some days and we got stranded at home for a few days. It would be good to have some candles or source of light, lighters, some lasting cans of food, water and a small bottled gas cooker like the one my grandmother used to use to make Greek coffee. Am I taking this too far? Is this just the beginning of me turning into a crazy prepper? OK, that’s not a proper word, but anyway, you know what I mean... Will I start looking into conspiracy theories and wait for the dead to rise?