What would happen if there was an emergency situation at your place ?

I swear I am going to invest in a bolt cutters and carry it with me.

Find a very cheap pair, paint them a nice bright colour, and hang them by the door. Or ask the guards for help doing getting hangars.

Or try to get rich off this. Find a Chinese company that makes door hardware, get them to design the sort of lock that can only be opened from inside and sets off an alarm. Then get your local government to require them everywhere.

"Buy one pant, get another for half-price".

Shouldn't that be, "Buy one, get the other half off"?

A-Train, wasn't that a Michael Jackson joke that went the rounds some years ago?

Yes, but I used it in the proper context.  That has to count for something.

At my last little outpost of progress, there were the obligatory chrome burglar bars on the windows, in addition to a jailhouse-type barred door leading to the foreign teachers' quarters. All that it would take lock us in would be to inadvertently close the door. God only knows if anyone had a key or not, and I am unsure why anyone would have wanted a barred door to be there anyway. Once closed, there would have been no way out.

My cell was on the first floor. During my first week there, I bought a pair of pliers and loosened the screws holding the bars in place. Most broke off in the process, so I kept the bars in place with wadded toilet paper. I just wet it and shoved it in place. Once it dried and hardened, it kept the bars in place and maintained the appearance of security. Had there been a need to escape quickly, I could have pulled the bars off with no trouble at all (provided, of course, that whatever calamity struck didn't render me unconscious.

The jailhouse door that led to the FT's quarters had me a bit puzzled. There were cameras everywhere around the outside of our wing, and there were sensors of some sort at every corner of steel fence that surrounded the wing. There was no way that anyone could enter or leave the area unobserved--- provided, of course, that someone was actually monitoring the cameras and sensors.

concrete apartments with little wood in them other than a few sticks of furniture surely means there isnt much of a fire hazard.

Interestingly, at my college a couple of weeks ago, I had an afternoon class cancelled, and one of the students sent me a message to let me know.  The reason for the cancellation was 'for us to learn what to do when the disaster strikes'.

And at the end of the same week, the whole college had a fire drill.  With screaming sirens, and even down to fire engines turning up.

So, at least in some places, this sort of thinking is starting to happen, and the responsibility for what might happen in the event of an emergency is obviously being looked at. 

Lin
Zhaoqing, Guangdong.

 

I can't believe how my university locks off the majority of the escape routes.  It un-nerves me to walk into the main, 12-story building on my way to the 8th floor knowing that there are only four doors available for that entire, gigantic building.

My family's house burned down on Christmas Eve about 30 years ago with 16 guests inside so I'm always a little cognizant of the escape routes.  There's no doubt that the practices here would be criminal in the U.S.  Will it take a Chinese version of the "Great White" fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire to change this?  Something tells me even that wouldn't do it.

Our school has implemented a procedure and we had a drill to make every one familiar with it.

1) all classes have a distinct and different coloured flag. In an evacuation, every student must follow the class teacher and look for that flag. This way, at the designed location to convene, we will know who made it out and who is missing

2) if a student can't find his specific coloured flag, try to follow another one as it will be part of our school's plan and that student can still be accounted for.

3) if the kid loses contact with any flag, still try to get out!

4) we tell the kids to stay with us, and not look for their parents. If mommy or daddy join us, fine, but the kid does not leave the group

At least this way we don't need to worry about who made it out, we will be able to account for who is missing.