The University of Florida removed a link to a disaster recovery exercise that detailed how the university would respond to a “zombie apocalypse,” saying the joke didn’t belong alongside plans to deal with hurricanes and pandemics, according to several reports.
The exercise spelled out the university’s response to attacks by “flesh-eating, apparently life impaired individuals” and notes that a zombie outbreak might include “documentation of lots of strange moaning.”
The guide included an “Infected Co-Worker Dispatch Form” for Florida employees to let superiors know when a colleague exhibits signs of zombie behavior, with a checklist of such behaviors, including “references to wanting to eat brains” and “lack of rational thought (this can cause problems confusing zombies with managers).”
The university employee who wrote the plan won’t be punished, the school announced.
A footnote in the plan suggests the importance of maintaining sensitivity in a time of zombie attack: “While many people refer to ‘undead,’ practitioners in the field of Zombie Studies and zombie advocates such as PETZ: People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies, and supporters of Florida Zombie Preserve, Inc. insist that the term ‘undead’ clearly connotes deficiency; specifically the absence of both life and death. Hence, we suggest here the term ‘life impaired’ to recognize the difficulties imposed on a former person by zombie behavior spectrum disorder (ZBSD) but without suggesting the former person is somehow ‘deficient’ as a result of the infection.”
Read the Gainesville Sun’s initial report.
