Crisis Management

Agent Anachan is on a mission in real life:  Operation BePositive.  Friday, her and her husband's place of employment experienced what is known as a "Reduction In Force", and every person employed by the main employer (as opposed to a subcontractor) was impacted.  You heard me right: 100% RIF, effective upon notification, and none of us knew we, personally, were going to be impacted until the day itself.  (Yea, they handled it kind of badly.  Scratch that--they handled it very badly.  I could go into more detail, but it would do no good.)  This post is a cathartic pick-me-up to remind myself that, really, who knows?  Our future may even be better.

Things learned in games about handling a crisis in real life:

Don't panic.  Think.  The patrol and an extra group were pulled accidentally because you were the victim of a knockback attack or something . . . You know you're in trouble.  Should you run away?  In some situations, this might make sense, but if you open up your mind and think about it, you just might be able to handle the situation.

Often, many people who die in crisis situations do so because they panic instead of think.  This is why you may find a mother and her child frozen in a Minnesota winter, a half mile away from their stalled car, even though the mother was born and raised in the area and should have known better.  Cory Lundin starts his books with the basic idea that the biggest enemy you have in a crisis is your own emotional state.  If you can decide to banish panic and simply think, you have a much higher chance of making it.  In other words, half the battle is the mind game.

Take everything a bit at a time.   Suppose you've got to make it from the roadway across a field of groups and patrols, all the way to the tent at the far end.  Take a deep breath and pull a group at the edge.  Pull them back, away from the patrols, if possible.  Then take the next group, or the patrol.  Bit by bit, you'll work your way across that field.

I heard once that "anyone can eat an elephant if you cut it up into small enough pieces".  And, likewise, crises are simpler to decipher and solve if you take it a portion at a time.

Handle the easy stuff first.  Is there a probe droid with a smaller amount of health which can be quickly knocked out?  That's one less thing beating on your tank companion or yourself, if you're the one doing the tanking.

Staring at the possible loss of our health insurance, one of the first things I knocked out of the way was to make annual doctor check-up appointments for all my daughters, before that coverage disappeared.  With that out of the way and immunizations brought up to date, we can wait a while before worrying about it again, if needed, thus removing one potential source of stress.  Easy stuff.

When facing an obvious threat, prepare an attack.  Offense is simpler to win than defense.  Sure, you might possibly be able to skirt around that group, if you hug the opposite side of the corridor.  But if you aren't successful, it will be more difficult to manage the situation advantageously than if you just got them out of the way at the start.

It reminds me of the time in college when my dermatologist gave me a prescription for worry. "First," he said, "imagine the worst that could happen." What? This is supposed to help me? "Then, accept the worst. Think in your mind it has already happened. What would you do? How would you deal with it?" Oh, I get it. If you have some kind of idea what you would do, you realize you can manage. There are options. It might not even be as bad as you anticipated. "Finally," he continued, "work to improve on the worst." So that, perhaps, the worst won't actually happen.  In other words, go on the offensive.

Remember all your resources, even the ones you don't use often or the ones you would rather not use.  Remember your interrupts, your stuns, your stims, your medpacs, and your crowd control abilities.  Do you have skills or abilities you don't use on a regular basis, but you could use if needed?  Pull them out, dust them off, and use them.

I have skills to be able to reduce living costs or help sustain my family in an emergency, such as baking, sewing, and growing just about any vegetable which forms on a vine.  I can make yogurt and fresh cheese, and I can harvest the juice from wild prickly pears.  And in accordance with the teachings of my religion, I have a certain amount of food storage in my home and garage.  (Which I know how to use.  It does no good to store wheat or dehydrated strawberries if you don't know how to make it into anything.)  It's good to know I have ways to take care of my family or reduce our costs in times of trouble.

Take care of yourself.  Keep up your buffs; keep up your life bar.  Pay attention to where you are standing and what is hitting you.  If you can stay out of the fire, that's that much less healing you're going to have to do.

Just because things have fallen all to pieces doesn't mean you stop wearing sunscreen or a hat in the hot desert sun.  I confess to having to remind myself to eat, but having kids helps with that.

Take care of your partners.  Healing Kaliyo is one of the best things you can do for your own survival as an Agent.  As in the Aesop's Fable, united, you can stand much better than divided.  It's good to have someone "watching your 6".

In spite of the crisis, take care of others and try to maintain a cheerful countenance.  It is likely your smile may be contagious, and the goodwill you spread will linger and perhaps come back to bless you when you need it.  (And remember, a well-timed homemade cinnamon roll on the desk of someone under great stress never goes amiss.)  There is nothing like a shared crisis to bring people together.

As long as you are alive, there is hope.  It might be a pretty close fight, but as long as there is a sliver of life left, you are still winning.  A cooldown might pop up, you might regain just enough force/energy for that necessary heal, or a hit might finally crit just enough to see the mob fall before you do. 

Enjoy the journey.  Even when you're in the middle of a jumbled mass of chaos against seven attackers, the mountains of Alderaan are still beautiful.  (As are the faces of my daughters.)

By the way, now that I'm not working there and you won't know where I live, because we have to move, I can now post that "Good Morning America" video I mentioned before this.  This is my family, back in 2008, when I was still working as a role player (I'm the blonde in blue grinning foolishly):

You can tell this place was a real "labor of love" for the people who worked here, which makes the current situation all the more painful.  It took a certain kind of mildly crazy person to put up with living in the middle of nowhere, where you might hear explosions or gunfire at all hours of the night or have a military helicopter buzz your house.  We had a lot of fun doing everything from role playing to wrangling goats to pitching in during an emergency to accomplish what seems to be impossible with the limited resources available in a rural setting, always with a smile and the feeling we were among friends and family.  I'm proud of our success, and I'm sad that the main employer will most likely end up throwing it all away by their "restructuring".  But it is what it is.