A Monday for the books

This morning at work, before I had my delicious Life Cereal I was looking forward to the whole drive in today, one of the construction workers made a horrible mistake. All of the people in our hallway are probably going to be enduring the results for the next several days.

Some new offices are being built across the hall from me. This has been in progress for the last 4 months or so, but the construction was especially noisy when I got in to work this morning. I turned on the radio and ignored it, and when I heard loud beeps, I figured it was just something new and annoying that they were doing. After awhile, I thought maybe it was a smoke alarm, and figured the smoke from their drywall saw might have set it off or something. I kept at my email. A few minutes of beeping later (which I was doing a really good job ignoring) one of the guys from down the hall comes banging on my door and says "Get out Josh!".

I opened my office door to see this:



Because my camera phone doesn't do this image justice, I will describe. A construction worker had sliced through a sprinkler pipe somehow, and now water was spraying from the roof all the way down the hall. A good inch of water already covered most of the floor outside my office, and I had just been working away, totally oblivious to this. The water was coming towards my door. Rather than run, I decided to snap another picture with the phone.



I spent the next several minutes sloshing around my office (which was rapidly filling with water) picking up anything and everything off the floor. A computer, power cords, my backpack. Anything I didn't want wet. Then, since I was the only one of my team actually in the office, I went to other people's offices and picked their machines up too. 5 or 10 minutes later, when the firemen showed up....I decided it was finally time to go. I ventured downstairs to find that it was raining on all the cubes below our offices.

I set up shop in an empty room with a wireless connection, wondering how long it would be before I'd be able to go back.

For the next several hours, they pumped and vacuumed water out of the building. It smelled like a mixture of wet dog and Grandma's garage. Not a good smell. Later in the day, they bought us all pizza and while we were eating lunch, they hooked up huge de-humidifiers and blowers to try and dry the hallway and our offices out.

By the time I left tonight, nothing had dried, and it still stank, but at least the standing water was gone.

I'm not looking forward to tomorrow. Actually, with all the action, I never did get my Life cereal today. I managed to save it from the flood, so maybe I am looking forward to tomorrow just a little bit.