Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Operational Details Matter: Things to Pay Attention to In an Emergency Operations Centre

They say that the devil is in the details. They also say that God is in the details. Whichever one is true, the main gist is cor­rect: you’ve got to pay atten­tion to the details if you want your emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre (EOC) to oper­ate smoothly and effec­tively. You need to pay atten­tion to details regarding:

• com­mu­ni­ca­tion within the EOC
• shared sit­u­a­tion awareness
• record­keep­ing & doc­u­men­ta­tion within the EOC
• com­mu­ni­ca­tion with exter­nal agencies
• shift changes

An emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre is, by nature, a com­mu­ni­ca­tion and coor­di­na­tion hub. That’s why it exists. Yet, I ask you how well peo­ple within your emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre really com­mu­ni­cate with one another. Really, how well do they com­mu­ni­cate? Do you know? Have you run exer­cises with peo­ple actu­ally play­ing through sce­nar­ios in the EOC? If not, then you don’t really know how peo­ple will react and perform.

When I ran an exer­cise in the our EOC last month, we found that there needed to be more and bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion between our var­i­ous sec­tions: Oper­a­tions, Plan­ning, Logis­tics and Finance & Admin. We also needed bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the Inci­dent Com­man­der through to all the sec­tions. In the debrief­ing that we con­ducted imme­di­ately after the exer­cise, par­tic­i­pants brought forth sev­eral rec­om­men­da­tions. We imple­mented a few of them, and to great effect.

The first is the use of a dash­board pro­jected on the wall at the front of the EOC. Dur­ing the exer­cise, we had used a Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion that kept cycling through mul­ti­ple slides. There was an area map, there was a background/context slide, there was a Cur­rent Sit­u­a­tion slide. How­ever, it was wordy, repet­i­tive, didn’t draw atten­tion to new con­tent, and some found it annoy­ing to be cycling all day. We replaced it with a solu­tion designed in-house (by yours truly!) using a data­base back­end to col­lect and process infor­ma­tion sub­mit­ted by any and all sta­tions in the EOC and using Excel to for­mat and present at the front of the room.  This solu­tion made updates instan­ta­neous and did not require one cen­tral per­son to mod­ify the Pow­er­point slides. It visu­ally high­lighted new con­tent, and allowed infor­ma­tion seg­men­ta­tion by sec­tor and chrono­log­i­cal organization.

Dur­ing the exer­cise, infor­ma­tion was shared pretty well within each sec­tion — pri­mar­ily by bounc­ing emails through shared email accounts for each sec­tion — but there was lit­tle com­mu­ni­ca­tion that enabled the entire EOC to remain aware of new devel­op­ments and main­tain a shared sit­u­a­tion aware­ness.  The intro­duc­tion and adop­tion of this dis­trib­uted dash­board sys­tem changed things. Now, when any sec­tion saw some­thing new hap­pen­ing, within sec­onds every­one in the room could see it. If some­one stepped away for a few min­utes or had been pre­oc­cu­pied with a task for a few min­utes, all they had to do was look up at the dash­board and see what had devel­oped since they last checked. Instant, effi­cient, and effective.

We also insti­tuted regularly-scheduled EOC brief­ings from the Inci­dent Com­man­der or the Oper­a­tions Chief. Many of the peo­ple in our EOC are office work­ers who are used to work­ing qui­etly. They’re not accus­tomed to actu­ally talk­ing to share infor­ma­tion across desks or between sec­tions. Yet, even with the dash­board on the wall, lead­ers need to ensure that every­one has a shared under­stand­ing of what’s hap­pen­ing, and what our plan is.  An inci­dent action plan is use­less unless the peo­ple who have to carry it out in a coor­di­nated fash­ion know what’s going on and what they need to do. By includ­ing sched­uled ver­bal brief­ings by lead­ers to the entire EOC, sit­u­a­tion aware­ness and coor­di­na­tion was improved in a vis­i­ble and obvi­ous manner.

Dur­ing the exer­cise, we had also failed to prop­erly doc­u­ment our actions. We did not main­tain action logs at each sta­tion, so it would have been impos­si­ble to piece together what each sta­tion had done dur­ing the evo­lu­tion of each sce­nario. That can be a minor hin­drance in an exer­cise, but it can mean seri­ous con­se­quences if there is an inves­ti­ga­tion fol­low­ing an actual acti­va­tion & response, whether that inves­ti­ga­tion is purely inter­nal or con­ducted by exter­nal agen­cies. Along the same lines as the dis­trib­uted dash­board, we imple­mented another Access data­base solu­tion that enabled each sta­tion to quickly type in action or deci­sion updates. The Access form would auto­mat­i­cally time­stamp each entry and add tags indi­cat­ing which sta­tion and indi­vid­ual had made the entry. It was far faster than a hand­writ­ten log and far eas­ier for the Finance & Admin sec­tion to pull out reports on the back-end than hav­ing each sta­tion use indi­vid­ual Excel or Word documents.

“Every­thing in war is sim­ple, but the sim­plest thing is dif­fi­cult. The dif­fi­cul­ties accu­mu­late and end by pro­duc­ing a kind of fric­tion that is incon­ceiv­able unless one has expe­ri­enced war.”
–Karl von Clausewitz

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion with exter­nal agen­cies is always thorny thanks to what can only be called “fric­tion”. The notable Ger­man strate­gist von Clause­witz is remem­bered well for his state­ment that even the sim­plest things are dif­fi­cult in war because lit­tle dif­fi­cul­ties accu­mu­late to pro­duce maddeningly-disruptive fric­tion that grinds one’s efforts to a halt. Sim­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion with exter­nal agen­cies can be fraught with such fric­tion. In our case, dur­ing our EOC acti­va­tion, our reg­u­larly sched­uled coor­di­na­tion tele­con­fer­ences expe­ri­enced the fol­low­ing issues:

• exter­nal agen­cies unsure which day the sched­uled calls would begin, even though they had received infor­ma­tion about the start date mul­ti­ple times in advance
• a typo in dis­trib­uted doc­u­ment, lead­ing half of the peo­ple to call the wrong num­ber on the first day
• tele­con­fer­ence sys­tem mal­func­tion which resulted in mul­ti­ple, inde­pen­dent tele­con­fer­ences being merged into one free-for-all com­mu­ni­ca­tion melee
• unau­tho­rized access to one of the tele­con­fer­ences, lead­ing to a num­ber of sub­se­quent changes in access num­bers and even tele­con­fer­ence services

Plan for con­tin­gen­cies. Check and double-check. It’s tedious, it’s annoy­ing, but it’s nec­es­sary. Yet, I’m will­ing to bet you still won’t catch all the lit­tle grem­lins that lurk in the details when it comes to com­mu­ni­ca­tion — even when it’s some­thing as basic as tele­con­fer­ences (albeit in our case it involved over 2 dozen exter­nal agen­cies and ourselves).

No sin­gle shift can remain oper­a­tional for mul­ti­ple 24-hour peri­ods. No decision-maker can remain sharp for mul­ti­ple 24-hour peri­ods, either. In fact, for sus­tained oper­a­tions, you must have mul­ti­ple shifts of per­son­nel and lead­er­ship. We’re all human. Yet, change of shift intro­duces small chal­lenges related to pass­ing on suf­fi­cient infor­ma­tion and con­text to sub­se­quent shifts.

A sin­gle busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity or emer­gency man­age­ment exer­cise likely will not require shift changes unless you design them in because exer­cises sel­dom run for more than a day, and often for much less than a full day.  Yet, this oft-ignored ele­ment of EOC oper­a­tions is crit­i­cal to ensur­ing a smooth, effec­tive response to what­ever the sit­u­a­tion hap­pens to be. In our case, we ensured time over­lap between shifts, devel­oped infor­ma­tion teplates to cap­ture the infor­ma­tion that sub­se­quent shifts would require, and we had the dash­board at the front of the EOC show­ing the next shift recent infor­ma­tion updates and currently-developing situations.

Run­ning an emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre is not an easy thing. You need to ensure that you have the right peo­ple, the right tools, the right struc­ture and processes, but you also need to pay atten­tion to the lit­tle details that enable all of those resources to func­tion the way you envi­sion.  Pay atten­tion to the details. Pay atten­tion to the details. Pay atten­tion to the details.

BCP & Emergency Management Exercises">It’s Only Ridiculous Until You Experience The Real Deal: BCP & Emergency Management Exercises

Design­ing and under­tak­ing exer­cises are crit­i­cal to the devel­op­ment and val­i­da­tion of busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity plans and emer­gency man­age­ment plans. They are also crit­i­cal to the train­ing & famil­iar­iza­tion that your organization’s peo­ple will need in order to respond as effec­tively as pos­si­ble when the time comes. Yet, exer­cises often aren’t taken seri­ously by man­age­ment or by par­tic­i­pants. Think of the most basic form of exer­cise in the field: fire drills. Do peo­ple take them seri­ously? Usu­ally not. Would they take it more seri­ously if you told them that some­times evac­u­a­tions are not just for fires but also for bomb threats or other inci­dents out­side the build­ing but close enough to be threats? Usu­ally not.

The most com­mon reac­tion to exer­cises is, “Yeah, but this is just a fic­ti­tious sce­nario. It won’t really happen.”

Imag­ine design­ing a busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity exer­cise or an emer­gency man­age­ment exer­cise that included all of the fol­low­ing ele­ments as injects or scenarios:

• earth­quake
• tor­nado
• power out­age
• chem­i­cal spill
• dis­ease outbreak
• riots with tear­gas deployed

You prob­a­bly wouldn’t be taken very seri­ously. Yet, that was pre­cisely the list of sce­nar­ios that my orga­ni­za­tion saw last week dur­ing our acti­va­tion for the G8 & G20 Sum­mits in Toronto.

We first acti­vated and staffed up our Emer­gency Oper­a­tions Cen­tre on Mon­day June 21 because police intel­li­gence had told us to expect protests to start by then. Noth­ing hap­pened. The next day, still noth­ing hap­pened. The third day, still nada.  Thurs­day, how­ever, brought us an earth­quake dur­ing the day and a tor­nado dur­ing the evening.  As a result of the tor­nado, some key facil­i­ties lost power and had to run on backup gen­er­a­tors. A sec­ond gen­er­a­tor had to be shipped in and hooked up at 4am in the morn­ing, but still some ser­vices were knocked out for the next day.  On Fri­day, there was a high­way inci­dent that involved a chem­i­cal spill and some of our folks have respon­si­bil­i­ties in such instances. Plus, there were reports of pos­si­ble dis­ease out­breaks in some of our areas of respon­si­bil­ity. By Sat­ur­day, there were riots in the city and police deployed tear­gas near our facilities.

I had actu­ally designed and con­ducted an exer­cise with our peo­ple about a month prior.  I had delib­er­ately loaded on a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios includ­ing chem­i­cal spills, dis­ease out­breaks, and denial of access to facil­i­ties.  There were other sce­nar­ios that pro­duced mass casu­al­ties or which led to ser­vice degra­da­tion or dis­rup­tion. I wanted to stress the sys­tem a lit­tle and see how well our plans, processes and pro­ce­dures would hold up. They held up well, but I got feed­back telling me I may have been a lit­tle excessive.

Peo­ple sang a dif­fer­ent tune after this past week, though. They told me that the exer­cise was good prepa­ra­tion for the real deal because the real deal stressed the sys­tem just as badly as the exer­cise had, but it was for real.

I have per­son­ally been in a build­ing that had a major fire rag­ing on one of its floors. In fact, I came close to dying from smoke inhala­tion in the evac­u­a­tion stair­well that evening. I know from first­hand expe­ri­ence that fire drills need to be taken seri­ously — lives can depend on them.

I have been through an emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre acti­va­tion where we had to coor­di­nate ele­ments to respond to all 6 of the sce­nar­ios I’ve listed above. Not just one of them, but all of them, and within the span of about 3 days. I know from first­hand expe­ri­ence that exer­cises that stress the sys­tem need to be taken seri­ously — things can be just as bad or worse when they really happen.

The It-Can’t-Happen-Here men­tal­ity is dan­ger­ous, par­tic­u­larly in the fields of busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity and emer­gency man­age­ment. How­ever absurd it sounds, I assure you there is a pos­si­bil­ity it can hap­pen. There’s a chance that absolutely noth­ing will hap­pen and you will have been over-prepared. If that’s what hap­pens, so be it. Yet, it would be (to put it lightly) very bad to be under­pre­pared if some­thing bad hap­pens — or sev­eral dif­fer­ent bad things happen.

Would you be taken seri­ously if you sug­gested that your orga­ni­za­tion would expe­ri­ence an earth­quake, have to deal with the effects of a tor­nado and its resul­tant power out­ages, respond to a chem­i­cal spill, respond to mul­ti­ple pos­si­ble dis­ease out­breaks, and deal with riot­ing in the city with police deploy­ing tear gas right near your facil­i­ties? If you think that you wouldn’t be, con­sider what my orga­ni­za­tion went through dur­ing the G8/G20 Sum­mits last week.

Some­thing like that only seems ridicu­lous until you’ve been through the real deal and seen it happen.

A Tale of Two Ethiopian Restaurants: Nazareth vs Queen of Sheba

I’ve now been able to try out 3 of the Ethiopian restau­rants around Toronto, and I can say unequiv­o­cally that Nazareth is the best one. I’ve tried Nazareth, Queen of Sheba, and Ethiopian House. Queen of Sheba and Nazareth are on Bloor, east of Duf­ferin. I got the two of these mixed up, which is why I now know I’ll never for­get which is the bet­ter of the two. Ethiopian House is just off Yonge, north of College.

Nazareth was the first place I’d tried, and based on some rather exten­sive online research, was the place that peo­ple seemed to think was the best Ethiopian joint in Toronto. A month or two later, I tried Ethiopian House. It was enjoy­able, but the por­tions were smaller and weren’t as tasty. Plus, Nazareth has bet­ter atmos­phere. Yet, it was just this past week­end that I ended up try­ing Queen of Sheba purely by accident.

You see, my friend and I intended to go to “the Ethiopian place on Bloor”. I searched online and quickly came across the name “Queen of Sheba”. I instantly rec­og­nized the name and fig­ured that must be it. So, off we went and got off at Duf­ferin sta­tion. We walked east on Bloor and came across Queen of Sheba. Hmm.. it looks dif­fer­ent. They must have ren­o­vated, I thought. How­ever, it wasn’t until after we sat down that all of a sud­den it dawned on me: this is the com­peti­tor that isn’t as good! Oh well. Might as well try it and see if what other folks said online is true.

I must now join the oth­ers whom I had read online and voice my opin­ion: Nazareth is head and shoul­ders bet­ter than Queen of Sheba. Nazareth is a cozy lit­tle joint with about 6 tables, excel­lent food, cheer­ful ser­vice from the lady who runs the joint, and pretty large por­tions. Queen of Sheba, by con­trast, is a dingy joint, with food that isn’t as tasty, with ser­vice with a scowl, and smaller por­tions. Really, I can’t think of any rea­son why any­one would know­ingly choose Queen of Sheba over Nazareth.

Ethiopian food is eaten with your hands. You take a piece of injera sour­dough flat­bread and pick up a bit of meat or veg­gie. If you’re like me, greedy to try as much vari­ety as pos­si­ble, it’s a good idea to order some beef, some lamb, some chicken, and some veg­gie assort­ments. Beer goes well with the food as it is a lit­tle spicy.

If you’re in the mood for Ethiopian, trek out west to Duf­ferin sta­tion and walk east. If you see Queen of Sheba, keep on walk­ing — Nazareth is just another few min­utes away to the east.

Of Course China has Spies in Canada!

The Direc­tor of CSIS, Canada’s intel­li­gence & espi­onage agency (read: “spy agency”), said a num­ber of inter­est­ing things in his inter­view with the CBC. The one that has gen­er­ated a fair bit of media buzz and which has ruf­fled the feath­ers in Ottawa and British Colum­bia is his state­ment that China has spies in Canada and some of them have sunk their hooks into Cana­dian politi­cians at the munic­i­pal & provin­cial levels.

The Direc­tor, Richard Fad­den, seems to be get­ting him­self into hot water. While he hasn’t recanted what he’s said, he’s clammed up now. I think the politi­cians are putting pres­sure on the man and may make him dis­ap­pear in short order. That, how­ever, should not take away from the fact that Mr. Fad­den has done the pub­lic a great ser­vice by cre­at­ing aware­ness that espi­onage goes on and that part of the game is sub­vert­ing other nations or influ­enc­ing their lead­ers towards cer­tain thoughts or actions.

A com­mon West­ern sen­si­bil­ity is that spy­ing is done only on ene­mies, and when it’s done, it’s the cloak-and-dagger James Bond vari­ety of spy­ing. Well, okay, clas­sic Bond before he turned into the action hero Bond of the 1990s. I think this way of think­ing par­al­lels the think­ing behind the the sport of box­ing — no hits below the belt, and it’s a stand-up fight. Unfor­tu­nately, that is the worst kind of way to fight in the real world, par­tic­u­larly between nations where the lives and wel­fare of mil­lions are involved.

China and many other nations prac­tice the prin­ci­ples espoused by Sun Tzu in his clas­sic trea­tise, The Art of War. Many peo­ple know two of his fun­da­men­tal principles:

1. If you know the enemy and know your­self you need not fear the results of a hun­dred battles.
2. To sub­due the enemy with­out fight­ing is the acme of skill.

The only way to truly know your enemy is through the use of spies. Cana­di­ans would do well to remem­ber that, and also to remem­ber that in the grand scheme of things, coun­tries who are “friends” now may not always remain friends. Spy­ing on coun­tries even before you are at war with them — whether of the hot or cold vari­ety — is sim­ply sensible.

To sub­due your enemy with­out a fight also requires skill and, very often, sub­terfuge. The use of spies to dis­cern crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion is a key part of this, but so is assas­si­na­tion, sab­o­tage, and manip­u­la­tion. We frown on assas­si­na­tion, per­haps right­fully so. Sab­o­tage might be best left to the open­ing acts of open hos­til­i­ties, as would hap­pen via cyber­at­tack. That leaves manip­u­la­tion. To me, it makes total sense for China to try to manip­u­late our lead­ers and to manip­u­late Chi­nese immi­grants. Why shouldn’t they do that? Put your­self in the shoes of the Chi­nese lead­er­ship and tell me why you wouldn’t do the same thing.

What Direc­tor Fad­den has revealed to the pub­lic should not be cause for McCarthyite witch­hunts.  It does not in and of itself taint polit­i­cal lead­ers across the board.  It does, how­ever, bring atten­tion to dusty cor­ners of our own coun­try and our own gov­er­nance that have long been neglected out of pub­lic igno­rance. I do not know the best way to pro­ceed from here, how best to use this new aware­ness and atten­tion to bol­ster our national, cul­tural and polit­i­cal defenses, but I am cer­tain that putting polit­i­cal pres­sure on the mes­sen­ger — Mr. Fad­den — is not the right way. Get­ting him to shut up or recant his mes­sage does not help the nation — it would sim­ply be Canada behav­ing like an ostrich, stick­ing our inno­cent head in the sand.

The truth is, there are Chi­nese spies in Canada. Also Amer­i­can, British, and French. Yes, these are coun­tries we trade with, shake hands with, and wish to con­tinue hav­ing pos­i­tive rela­tions with. That does not, how­ever, mean that these coun­tries are not also under­tak­ing spy activ­i­ties against us to fur­ther their own goals. Though this news is caus­ing a bit of a stir, it should not. It should intead lead to action and change in per­spec­tive and behav­iour that bet­ters the nation.

Our polit­i­cal lead­ers would do well to under­stand the pow­er­ful nation and com­peti­tor across the Pacific the same way that busi­ness lead­ers in the 80s and early-90s tried to under­stand Japan­ese com­peti­tors. A good start would be to famil­iar­ize our­selves with the prin­ci­ples from The Art of War. It helps a lot to explain the asian way of think­ing about com­pe­ti­tion and con­flict, and that means know­ing our enemy bet­ter to improve our odds on the global play­ing field.

Coming Back to an Old Favorite: Fujitake 300mm Gyuto

I haven’t used my Fuji­take 300mm gyuto much as of late. I’ve had other kitchen toys to keep my hands busy, par­tic­u­larly as I’ve been on a bit of a car­bon steel ride and got my hands on a num­ber of nice spec­i­mens. How­ever, I decided to pick up my Fuji­take tonight, and wow, it was a fun and exhil­a­rat­ing expe­ri­ence! I had for­got­ten how nicely the blade han­dles, and now that I’ve got­ten used to longer blades in the kitchen, it’s become an absolute joy to use!

I first bought this fine Japan­ese kitchen knife a lit­tle more than a year ago. So, by that mea­sure, it’s not an old knife at all. It is, how­ever, my very first Japan­ese cook­ing knife and from that per­spec­tive, the Fuji­take is the old vet­eran amongst my J-blades! In case you haven’t used longer knives in the kitchen, 300mm is about 12 inches of good, sharp steel. The beauty of this knife, and other qual­ity Japan­ese knives, is that even at this length, the knife is light, nim­ble, and agile. The Fuji­take tonight lit­er­ally flew through my din­ner prep, and it was lit­er­ally more fun for me than test-driving a new car.

The Fuji­take is light, tip­ping the scales at just over 200g, and is a thin blade at just over 2mm at the spine right ahead of the bol­ster. It’s well-balanced, and although I don’t know what steel it is, gets plenty sharp for home use.

When I vis­ited Sanko Cook­ing Sup­plies in San Francisco’s Japan­town, I really didn’t know a whole lot about Japan­ese knives. About all I knew was that I wanted a good Japan­ese gyuto in high-quality stain­less steel. Based on my novice research, I was con­vinced that I wanted VG-10 steel. Noth­ing else would do, really. Com­ing from my trusty old (and in this case, about 12 years old) Henck­els 8″ chef knife, I knew I wanted some­thing longer. I tried out sev­eral knives at the counter, and finally had to decide between a 270mm gyuto (of long since for­got­ten make) and the Fuji­take 300mm. Hon­estly, the Fuji­take felt lighter in the hand, felt more nim­ble, felt more com­fort­able. It was $70 more than the 270mm knife, but spend­ing the extra $70 for some­thing just a lit­tle longer and notice­ably more com­fort­able was both accept­able and rea­son­able.  The store­own­ers weren’t really able to tell me what the steel was in the Fuji­take, and the brochure didn’t help a whole lot. The own­ers said some­thing “VG”, so I fig­ure the steel must be either VG-1 or VG-10. Okay.

Walk­ing out of the store with $500 less to my name, I was then the proud owner of my very first Japan­ese gyuto. When I got home almost a month later, I started to use the knife. It was a bit too much of an adjust­ment to me at the time, though. I won­dered if I’d made a mis­take get­ting some­thing so long. Sure, the length would come in handy for mon­ster prep ses­sions where I’d be dic­ing up tons of veg­gies, chop­ping up tons of herbs, and cut­ting my way through a moun­tain of food for a feast, but how often would I do that and need the 300mm of cut­ting steel? I then pro­ceeded to pick up some other knives in 240mm and 270mm length.

Those other knives are fine knives in their own right. Still, the Fuji­take only saw occa­sional use, and I won­dered at times about whether I’d cho­sen a good knife and whether it’s really worth the $500 I paid for it. In one respect, I over­paid, because now with my greater knowl­edge of knives, I could pick some­thing else that has more ooooh and ahhh fac­tor for the money, or some­thing hand­made or some­thing with kick­ass steel.

Yet, after using the knife again tonight fol­low­ing a several-month hia­tus, I am still happy with my pur­chase. This knife kicks ass. It bal­ances extremely well, cuts like a dream, and now with more expe­ri­ence behind me, doesn’t feel long at all. My guess now is that the steel is VG-1. Sure, I’m far more likely to pick car­bon steel blades over stain­less steel now, but the bot­tom line with a knife made of any steel is how well it cuts and how well it feels in the hand. The Fuji­take cuts excel­lently and feels won­der­ful. It’s not exotic steel, it’s not hand­made, and it’s not even a fancy name that knife afi­ciona­dos would admire, but it is a stel­lar per­former for me.

I’m glad I was intro­duced to this knife early in my J-knife expe­ri­ence, because hon­estly at this point, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have given it a chance. I would have bypassed it for one of the big names in J-knife cir­cles. I would have missed out on this “lit­tle” gem.

I’m glad I picked up the Fuji­take tonight. I’m glad I came back to an old favorite. I no longer feel guilty or remorse at hav­ing spent the money on this knife. I no longer feel like I made a mis­take buy­ing at full retail. I feel priv­i­leged to have the knife and to use the knife. I feel that the ser­vice Sanko gave me in per­son and hav­ing the knives on-hand for me to test with my own hands at the store is worth the pre­mium that I paid.

Fuji­take is hard to find in North Amer­ica. You might never come across it in-person or online. Maybe you don’t want any­thing in VG-1 steel. Maybe you think 300mm is too much to han­dle. If you hap­pen to be in San Fran­cisco, drop by Sanko and give the knife a try. If you like how it feels in the store, I assure you that you will absolutely love it when you get to use it in your own kitchen.