The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Surprises suck

3) SURPRISE! …Nothing works.

If you’re unfortunate enough to be stuck in a city (Or, on a road heading into a city), when a zombie apocalypse hits, there’s an additional little problem that you may encounter, and is both why you should memorize maps of any city you plan on going to and why you may not be aware of a what’s causing a never-ending traffic jam until it’s too late: Once the outbreak begins, communications will probably start failing.

Why?  Well, electrical and phone systems need people to run them somewhere along the line, and even if none of them get infected, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re going to have loved ones that they’re going to start worrying about. Even in a best-case scenario, where these critical workers might believe their job site is the safest place to be, they’re still going to leave their posts to try to retrieve their families and bring them back there, meaning, sooner or later, electricity and communications will break down, likely at the worst possible time.

This means that, if you read my first slide and figured that you’d just use your phone to figure out where to go to escape the dead…(Surprise!) you’re probably going to be out of luck, as either you can’t get a call through, or your internet can’t get a signal.

This also means that, when you’re on the road (Especially if it’s one you’ve traveled hundreds of times, and, therefore, don’t need your phone to give you directions), you’ll probably not even notice that anything’s wrong, until the traffic jam goes on for a while, some cars stack up behind you, and you try to use your phone to pass the time or get a traffic report, and realize your internet isn’t working.

I can’t really give a solution to this problem, as there’s no real way to fix it on your own unless you work at power station or some such place, but, I can give you something to lessen the impact: Learn to become independent of your phone. This is why I suggested memorizing maps earlier, so that you don’t need to use your phone to do it, and having physical maps is preferable, too, so that, if you can’t memorize the map or the layout or whatever, you have a map that doesn’t need the internet to be seen.