It was another long, dull morning at the office. Fortunately, the afternoon proved to be quite a bit more interesting. While I was examining an issue reported by one of our beta users; I heard some shouting about a fire from one end of the building. Popping my head up like a good, office gopher; I saw some people rushing about, the overhead lights that was were off and the safety lights were on. Shortly after that I was told a fan in one of the bathrooms had caught on fire, burning/melting some of the plastic of the fan. There was only a little bit of smoke right then and the fire had been put out so I went back to work. Then the smoke got worse and I stood with some co-workers near an exit with the door open to the outside for fresh air. We stayed inside as it had also just started to rain. A few minutes later, we heard sirens and were told to either go to the top floor of the building or outside. I opted to stand outside. After we were out there for something like 20 minutes; we were told to go home for the day. Which was a sweet 90 minutes early, but I had a fearsome headache presumably from the chemical fumes off the burning plastic. What a day.

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6 thoughts on “Up in Smoke

  1. And naturally on a day with all this excitement, it would also happen to be the day I did not strap my camera to my belt before leaving the apartment this morning. *sigh*

  2. Oh, I should probably also mention that nobody was hurt during the fire. Though several of us were coughing pretty hard.

  3. @Dan: This was at the old job. The new job doesn’t start until next week.

    @Ken: They don’t own the building and besides the damage was so very minimal that we were working in the office the next day.

  4. I must admit to being curious who you’ll be working for as a data analyst. Is it in the IC/Coralville area? If you feel like sharing, drop me a line. I recently did a job transition myself.

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