A Situation Involving Firefighters at 1 a.m. Sounds Like a Good Time, But Really it Isn't

So this week has been crazy busy... Monday the Executive dropped his proposed 2008 budget and that starts the clock for Council staff. We have until Thanksgiving basically to scrub the budget. A lot of it is really just a political battle between the two branches of government. Anyhoo, it means I've been working like a dog. Monday I worked until 5 (like normal), but Tuesday I worked until 7:30, Wednesday I worked until 9:00, and last night I worked until 11:00!!

I didn't mind working too late because I was really on a roll. So I got home pretty late, walked the doggies, and got into bed to go to sleep -- by then it was about 11:45 or so. Almost immediately, the building's fire alarm started going off intermittently. An obnoxious, ear-splitting BEEP every few minutes. This continued for about 15 minutes!! It was like midnight and the dogs were going crazy because of the buzzers (plus they were all amped up from being stuck at home by themselves all day), so I went down into the lobby to see what the hell was going on. A bunch of firefighters and a few of my neighbors were congregating in the lobby... Turned out a renter in the building (who has a serious hoarding problem and has trashed the unit he's in) had somehow broken a sprinklerhead, so his unit was filled with water and the water was flooding Riveted, the jeans store, down below. So the firefighters had to break into Riveted to try to deal with the alarms going off, etc.

By the time I went back upstairs it was almost 12:30. I get into bed again thinking the firefighters were on site so the problem should basically be resolved, but the alarms went off again at about 1 a.m. ACK!!!

So after all that commotion, I couldn't sleep, so I stayed up to read until about 2, and then got up at 6 to walk the dogs and go to the gym. I'm running on 4 hours of sleep and it isn't pretty.

What a shitty night!!!