nggh...nggh...nggh...

Nice way to start the week off - misfiring boiler in the basement sends a little bit of smoke and fumes up into the building (I swear; I thought the vague smell I picked up earlier was sewer gas from the earlier rain), fire dept gets called, firemen come banging on the door at 12:30 in the morning.... fire alarm never went off. Still I hear the slamming of fists on the door, I go open it (and I realize now if I hadn't they would have forced it open), they come striding through my apt, looking for a way to the basement. In the back hallway, there's an (always locked) door to the basement; the maintenance people access the basement from a different door in the building's back - but unsure of which one they mean, I mention that inside one...they go out the back apt door, pause in irritation before the small but blocking pile of stuff I store in the foyer near that never-opened door [this is 'having dirty underwear on'-level embarrassment, mind], and lob it with brutal efficiency out the back door, then force the door open, even as I'm telling one that there's also that door in the building's back, which they then walk outside to and similarly force open. Someone asks me who the landlord is; I'm so discombolulated I can't pull up the name from memory to answer. I go get my address book and call the landlord's emergency #, someone answers, I say the fire dept showed up, but the alarms never went off. I get some reply about how they'll fix it tommorrow. Fine; I wasn't the first to call. Meanwhile the firemen went down, turned off the boiler or furnace or whatever it was, then tromped back through the ap't, got in their trucks, and left.

Cut to me doing the mental equivalent of standing there going "nggh...nggh...nggh...", then shakily retrieving my stuff from outside the back steps where it was strewn on the grass, piling it back where it'd been, opening my windows a little, climbing back into bed and trying to relax, then hearing what I now understand was my next door neighbor's CO alarm going off again (they were just put in a few weeks ago).

I get up again, she says she called them to come back again, I run out the back apt door, drag that pile of stuff I'd put back there into my living room area, grab the cat carrier, and crate the cat. Put on my bathrobe and slippers. Firemen arrive again, but only need the neighbor to leave her apt briefly while they check it with their CO detector. Several of us wait around until the ppm comes back down to normal levels; they tell her to leave her windows open so the few lingering boiler fumes won't build up again, then leave.

Now I'm sitting here in my 48 degree apt, wondering when I'll come down from the delightful adrenaline burst I had the last hour.