Mrs. O'Leary

This morning I exited our elevators and immediately noticed my supervisor walking by down the hall, wearing stretch pants and a denim shirt with embroidery on the back. I immediately thought to myself, that's odd, as I work in an office with an extremely conservative dress code (suits etc).

Well, I turned the hallway and noticed that the hallway carpet was missing and the checkered tile was showing (On Friday we had a carpeted hallway). I walked into my office which was open (also odd since I'm almost always at work before my officemate) and noticed a table that used to be in the hallway in my doorway. I thought, well, I've always thought a table would be cool in here, but not so much in the doorway.

A co-worker came over and told me what happened. A fire started in the office 6 doors down from mine. A surge protector that was piggybacked on another surge shorted, caught the drapes on fire, the sprinklers went off and a window was blown out. The fire was responded to 3 minutes after the sprinklers went off so it was contained to one office. However, the water damage from the sprinklers and the fireman's hose damaged the hallway carpet and 6 other offices. My side of the hallway had minimal damage because the building tilts just enough for the water to just damage the offices on the south side of the hallway and not the north side (where my office is). The office where the fire took place will need some rehabilitation. There's smoke damage, water damage, and its missing a window. Many of the files are damaged but we have all of it backed up on our office hard drive. The director of the office called most of the office, somehow I didn't get the message that we could dress in normal casual wear. Oh, well.