Fire
Well, I'm at home now... Want to hear about my day? Well, I arrived late to work and was sorta getting organized (Monday's suck), posted the preceding story about day 11 of my diet, was thinking about posting something else, when someone came back from the basement where they were having their coffee (there's a bunch of new machines downstairs - it's like a mini-bar now) and said there's a fire going on downstairs. Fire? One would think we would all be panicked, but this is the second time this has happened. The first time one of the hallways filled with smoke and we got a little worried, but it wasn't anything. This time, I guess, it was a bit different.
While they were downstairs, the electricity and network went down (but not the lights). We're all on laptops, so we all just looked around to see if it was just us who didn't have power or Internet. Then the guys came back and said Fire and we were just sorta nonplussed, chatting while the network was down and suddenly a bunch of people start filing past. The word was that it was a real fire and we needed to get out. No alarm, just "let's go". Thank goodness I wasn't in the bathroom or anything.
So we all left the laptops - mine's locked down with a cable, but everyone else's were just sitting there which isn't very good - and filed out. We're on the first floor so we were one of the first people out of the building and sorta thinking whether this was a false alarm, but then ALL the rest of the people came out of the building - which is 4 stories tall and really wide, all owned by the same company - about 1000+ from my guesstimates. And sorta like sheep we all waited around outside looking at the building, wondering if it was going to go up in flames or not right then.
A few minutes later a couple ambulances arrived, which made me think this wasn't as fun as it first seemed, and then a single firetruck. (The firemen have got those cool Farenheit 461 helmets here...). We wandered around for a bit more as police came and went, etc. Then I decided to walk up with some co workers to the mall at the top of the street and see what sort of toys I could find for Alex (there's an Imaginarium there). After a while, I found a magazine shop that had a bunch of great magazines in English, so I passed an hour there browsing the latest Wired, Red Herring, Fast Company, Newsweek and Economist as well as a couple Mac mags just to drool and torture myself. There were some interesting articles. I'm going to see if I can find some of them online and blog about them.
Anyways, at the end, I wandered back down to the building saw that the police had blocked off the street for cars, so I realized nothing had really improved and found a coworker who was waiting near one of the entry ways to the building and asked him what was up. He was waiting to get at his laptop, which was just sitting there inside, but told me the word was that if you didn't need anything that you should just go home. Woohoo! I'm not sure if that was accurate or not, but I took him at his word and beat it.
Came home, had a nice lunch with the fam (roast beef, mmmmmm!) and now I'm blogging all this because it's quite the event. Never really been in a fire that I didn't start before.
More info tomorrow when I find out what happened.
-Russ
P.S. So how was YOUR day?