In order to accommodate the arrival of Brad and his crew, I am working on a Quarantine Zone that we have taken to nicknaming The QZ. (Note: We know it is Brad and his two coworkers Kelsey and Keith and local customers named Amber, Ashlynn, and Shannon.)
The only real choice was to convert the Produce Department’s Prep Area into the QZ. It has only been 10 days but the Produce Department is already starting to thin out tremendously. Dairy is going the same way. With the oldest dated milk we have on hand being the 18th, dairy is shrinking fast and I think we could even afford to condense the dairy and the produce into one cooler. So we have been working on that. When you assign 10+ people towards a task, it gets done pretty quick. Many hands make light work.
The produce cooler is a lot like the meat department cooler in that there are drains and we have one hose (but no control over water temperature). The two doors that lead out of the produce cooler are pretty old and all we have to do is remove the exit pins from them and the doors cannot be opened from the inside. (Yeah, if there are any fire marshals out there, come give us a ticket!) That leaves only one entrance from Produce to the rest of the store. And we can easily close that area off with a stack of pallets.
Now, the Produce “Back Room” has a lot. There is a prep sink, drains, and we have buckets from bakery that we could fill with cat litter from the pet food aisle. (Crude, I know.) We have this little TV with a DVD player that we use for product demos. We have magazines and a small assortment of books from that section of the store. Produce does have its own computer which does feature Solitare, Hearts, Spider, and Mindsweeper. And we have already set up pallet stacks along with full length pool rafts. (We have been using inflatable pool rafts to sleep on.)
The produce prep room is equipped with a security camera so we can monitor them from the Store Director’s Office to make sure everything is okay. We even have an intercom system so we can talk on the internal phone lines.
If Brad and his survivors want to come into our area, we have to quarantine them. Who knows? What if other survivors show up down the road? We need to be prepared for them as well.
So we let them come in the store and they have to hang out for two days to make sure they are not showing any symptoms. It is going to be harsh but I think we need it for the safety of our collective group.
Selling this idea will not be as easy. I need to sleep on it and figure out the best way to sell this to the crew.
