Yesterday (Friday) I woke up and decided to do a little work on my thesis. I worked throughout the day from 11am to 2pm. During that time I turned the heater on for the first time this year (that's a nice pro for living in PHX) for a total of 10 minutes. This is an important fact for later in the story.
At around 2pm I went to the kitchen to make me a veggie burger (yep, I know but its microwaveable and pretty easy to eat; plus I had 2 vegetarian roommates for 2 years). I had the microwave and toaster going (love toasted buns) and all of a sudden I smelt smoke in the kitchen (crazy how fast it surrounds you). I believe I was cutting cheese when I realized it was around me. Anyways, I went in panic mode and popped up the toaster to find the buns not even cooked (not the toaster), stopped the microwave (not that), put the vent on to get the smoke out, but it was already getting to the living room.
Now I'm in semi-panic mode. I'm thinking that its my fault. And the only thing that it could be was the heater, considering it was used for the first time in a year. I have now abandoned my lunch, running around the house to clear the smoke out. Meanwhile, the fire alarm in my room goes off. Full panic now consumes me. I go to the fire alarm to try and stop it... don't succeed in this. Now I'm thinking that I've somehow started this smoke/fire, and will be responsible for all the fire trucks/services that come to the house. I open the front door to get the smoke out and run out to already see a cop outside the condos. He yells, "there's a fire, you need to get out" and I yell, "all I did was turn the heater on for 10 minutes.... and it wasn't the toaster". He yells back in quite a confused daze, "there is a fire, you need to get out and help me get other people out of their apartments". I yell, "I promise, its just smoke in my place."
I then see about 3-5 fire trucks pull up and begin to realize that there is a fire in the condo that is directly on our backside (aka we share a wall, which turns out to be a fire wall luckily). I proceed to get others out of their condos. One guy was sleeping the whole time and firemen had to go in and wake him up as smoke filled his room, which is crazy. Turns out that a candle (I think it may have been illegal substances) set the fire in the place behind us, and clear (not black, thankfully) smoke filled our whole house. Now we are in the process of getting everything back to a regular, non-campfire smell. All in all, we (me, roommate, and his cat) are ok, I just stink like smoke all the time.
1 comment:
Good story. And you didn't even have to find a $5 bill.
Post a Comment