Office of Death

I was idly minding my own business on Monday afternoon, wading through various piles of mortgage documents at my desk, when suddenly everything in the office took on a strobe-light quality. All the lights, along with every electrical device, started rapidly flickering off and on. After verifying that I wasn't having a stroke or seizure and this was actually happening in the real world, I went sprinting around the office trying to unplug all the computers and monitors, since I vaguely remembered something from my computer science days about power surges being bad for computers.

That went on for about 3 minutes, non-stop. During that time, my boss patiently continued the phone conversation she was conducting at her desk, while I ran through the office like a frightened squirrel, unplugging things. Finally everything in the office shut down entirely for a couple of seconds and the backup generators came up. That gave us power to the lights in the office, but pretty much nothing else. Also, that meant that the air conditioning stopped blowing, so we could smell the unmistakable scent of an electrical fire.

After some additional frightened squirrel running on my part to verify that nothing in our office was currently aflame, we tried to decide on the best course of action at this point. I was all for bolting for the nearest exit and huddling in the parking lot until a burly fireman personally assured me that the threat of fire was gone. But my boss decided that instead of frightened huddling, we should stay in the office and contact everyone we were working with to let them know we had lost power, so they wouldn't think we had just stopped working because we're slackers. I was slightly against making conversational business calls while the office building around us was consumed in flames, but as I couldn't find any source of fire or smoke (just the hideous smell) and there was no fire alarm, I reluctantly agreed and grabbed the phone.

Around the start of the third call, the floor manager (who already thinks I'm crazy, btw) busted in my office to ask why the hell I was still in the office. I agreed and asked her indeed, what was I doing still there, but the irony was lost on her. Since she had to evacuate everyone from the floor before she got to leave, my little attempts at wit were directly affecting her chances of survival. She had no time for banter and almost flung me bodily from the room. My boss looked over at the two us and calmly held up one finger, like, hold on this call is almost over. The floor manager rolled her eyes so hard I worried that they'll fall from their sockets and she started rushing me down the hall.

We all made it to the ground floor by heading through the stairwell where the lights were still strobing (which made the walk down just a touch treacherous), and were told to hang around in the lobby until the fire department got there and could investigate where the fire was and why the alarms never went off.

My boss decided to screw waiting though, as we are busy people, and sent me off on the numerous errands that we could fill this unproductive standing-around-celebrating-our-escape-with-our-lives time with. I went to the bank to make some deposits (the boss had thoughtfully had me grab our outstanding checks as we fled the building for our lives) and regaled the teller with my harrowing story of near-fire-death. She was less than impressed for some reason (possibly because there was no smoke, or fire, and because I had fled the building based on a smell) which made me generally resentful for the rest of the transaction. At least she offered me a sucker from her jar of bank candy afterwards, which helped sooth my pain.

When I got back to the office, a really nice and cute fireman let me go back up to our floor, as they determined that there was no actual fire. One of the generators, or transformers, or something (he was really cute, it was hard to focus on the words) down in the basement had shorted out, and it had caused everything else to shut down. The smell came from the shorted out unit and just happened to propagate up to us because we have a dedicated air flow line to our floor from the basement.

We still only had backup power, though, for the remainder of the day, which meant absolutely no computers, or air conditioning, and if you wanted to go to the bathroom you had to do so with the lights strobing all around you. It was like peeing in a discotheque.

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And that's the story of how I almost (okay not even close) died in the office. I would have told the story earlier, but as luck would have it, yesterday right around 10 in the morning our corporate office had a catastrophic systems failure at the north branch, which completely cut all of our communication with the Internet, email, and information systems until about 6 this morning.

I swear, it's like my office is turning into the Temple of Doom over here. I expect the next time I head out of my office, a giant boulder of paperwork and discarded coffee mugs will start chasing me down the hallway.

Come to think of it, I really should have brought my fedora in to work.