Random Chaos

Problem was, I was entirely too hyped up on what had happened to be able to focus on one thing at a time, and that included being able to write a damn thing.

The last time that I had a Saturday that was this exciting was last year, when the bus that I was on the way home from work on was being shot at at one point. Normally nothing else would be as exciting, but yesterday there was something that had me so wired that didn’t get any sleep until earlier today when my blood pressure dropped through the cellar and knocked me out.

I was cleaning a block of rooms on the second floor, moving as fast as I could manage it, when on the return from dumping linen down the linen chute, I sneeze once.  Then twice.

I only sneeze out of nowhere when there’s a sudden appearance of an irritant where there was none before.  I stop and give the air an experimental sniff: smoke.  It smell like burning paper, but then again it kind of doesn’t.


Lemme preface this:  I’ve got a fairly strong sense of smell.  I can detect smoking in a non-smoking room from several yards away even with precautions (like damp towels beneath doors) on a still day.  If a guest smells something, or a coworker suspects something, they call me.  If I don’t smell it, it probably ain’t there.  Anyway.

I test the air a few times before I go and call the front desk.

“Front desk.”

“Yeah, Theo—I smell smoke up here.  I don’t know what kind it is but something up here is burning.”
(…I always fiat the names of my coworkers.  If he reads this and finds out that I’ve fiated his name to Theo, y’see, he’s either going to laugh his ass off or give me a month’s supply of Jell-O to troll me.  I can’t eat the stuff. Long story.  I might tell it at one point.  It’s not relevant today.)

“…do you know which room?”

“There’s only one it could be.”

“Well, let’s hope not.  Knock on the door, announce ‘Housekeeping!’ and say that you wanted to see if everyone is all right—make it sound like you’ve been to the other rooms too.”

“Got it.”

I pantomime going to the other rooms before knocking on the last one.  After three knocks, the door opens—and hits the chain hard.  A small boy, about three, has answered the door.  He’s stark naked, and looks up at me.  I have just enough time to notice that he’s kind of adorable before the door closes hard.  But I also notice the smell of burning paper.  Or is plastic?  I can’t tell.  My next turn is to the phone.

“Front De—”

“Yeah, Theo, there’s definitely something burning up here—but the only answer was a kid.  I don’t know if there’s anyone else in there, even though I knocked hard.  I keep hearing the microwave going on and off.”

“Okay, I’ll send Jane and Laura up.”

“Thanks.”

It’s a minute later—literally sixty seconds—I’m convinced that these two know how to use Reverse Polarity or something; Jane’s armed with a clipboard, which she uses to knock.  Laura mentions she’s not positive that she smells anything when--

*BANG BANG BANG.*  “Housekeeping!”

The door opens, this time with an adult at the helm—and I’m knocked backwards. There is a faint blue haze in the doorway as she sticks her head out, as well as the smell of burning paper, plastic, metal, and something else that I can’t identify, but sticks in the airways like the scent of oiled burning leather.

“We need to check up on you—we’ve got reports of the smell of something burning.”

“There’s nothing burning—I don’t have a match or a lighter or anything…” she answers, seeming a bit disconnected.

Jane, Laura, and I all exchange “WAT?” faces.  We can see the smoke.  They can smell it.  Hells, it’s making me woozy.

“Are you sure?” Laura’s eyebrow goes up.

“I really don’t smell anything.”

Laura and Jane look at me.

“Check the microwave,” I say.

“I honestly can’t smell anything.”

“Check…the microwave,” I repeat, holding my scrubs to my nose.  It was damn near impossible to breathe.

The lady in the room opens the microwave--

Billowing clouds of bluish-black smoke erupt from the microwave oven as the door opens.  Within seconds I’m ordered to pick up a bunch of cups and help start filling them.  There is a pile of something inside of the microwave, smouldering and burning low inside the thing.  Our goal is now to quench the fire in the box so that we can prevent the sprinklers from going off and flooding the second floor.

Without anything better to do, I open things and pull windows open.  The second floor now smells like burning fabric, burning metal, hot glass, burning metal, and…burnt paper.  The combination is positively noxious, and incredibly chemical.  The place has to be vacated.

On the way out, we discover that the woman and the three-year-old—who we find out was the one who set the fire—were not the only the guests.  There was also an 18-month-old in there.

As it turns out, the kid was the one who had started the fire:  he’d put a pack of brand-new tube socks into the microwave and turned it on, several times, and ignited the socks that way.  This wasn’t the first time that this kid had caused trouble; earlier that day, the kid had been spotted running through the halls—again, stark naked—waving a twenty-dollar bill around.  The mother had no idea, and had slept through it.  She’d admitted to being at least partially high according to the supervisors at that time, and said she’d do something about the kid’s running around.  The chain had served that purpose—but instead, he’d apparently decided to see what happens when you take cotton-poly-spandex tube socks and heat them up on the ‘baked potato’ setting on a microwave.

We put out the fire; the microwave—burnt, warped, too hot to remove from the premises for an hour after the incident, and with what looked like bullet-holes through it from the intense heat—was a total loss.  The room itself will be off the market for a long time after that.  The room’s guest, proven several times to be negligent and now a clear danger to the well-being of others, had to be evicted.  I had to watch, make sure that the woman did nothing untoward to the children as she left.  For the rest of the day, my co-workers gave me the ‘big damn heroes’ treatment; it’s continued through today.

As I said, Saturdays usually aren’t so exciting.  But I gotta admit, I haven’t felt that alive in ages.  I actually accomplished something for once.  And that’s saying something.