Gulliver's Travel - Vol 5. The Maple Leaf Story

wet dog

Rule No. 2 of living in Rez is "Don't do anything stupid to set off the sprinkler systems on your floor". Now, there's a reason why this rule made it into the top 3...primarily because of the potential in the severity of consequences if the sprinkler system was to go off. The consequences would basically entail complete flooding of that particular floor, including all its contents, and any other subsequent floors beneath it. Not to mention, setting off the fire alarms, the arrival of the fire brigade and the evacuation of the entire building. For these reasons, people are usually quite cautious in not doing anything stupid. Well, sometimes rules are made to be broken but other times poo still hits the fan even when you abide by the rules...and that was the killer.

12:10am 5th of august, 3rd floor.
People were schnoozing, others were chilling in the corridors and as for me, i just got back from a midnight snack, when out off nowhere one of the sprinklers in the corridor went off, followed shortly by the fire alarms. Now if you've never seen a sprinkler system go off, its quite a sight. Water doesn't just trickle out, no...it pisses like a racehorse and whats more is that its not the clean fresh water you have coming outta the taps, no siree, its a brown gunky muck of stagnant water that's been sitting in the pipes since the last time the system went off. Everyone got outta there pretty quick admist a myriad of profanities being muttered and general chaos. Sure enough, the fire brigade turned up within minutes with their sirens blarring only to be notified that it was a false alarm. They weren't too happy. But then again most of the people in the building weren't exactly happy chappies either. Some poor guy ran out into the midnight cold only in his pair of boxers cos he didn't have enough time to find his pants. I felt sorry for him, his nipples and i bet you he felt the draught too...it gets pretty chilly at night in Vancouver.

At 2am they let us go back into the building. 1st floor looked ok. ran up the flight of stairs. the stairwell was wet. 2nd floor, didn't look too bad, slight patches of dampness were evdient. Ran up another flight of stairs...wet stairs. 3rd floor...oh mama.

Our corridor was under a good half in of water and in some other places, a full inch. Some guys got lucky and the water didn't quite reach the end of their end of the corridor since there was a slight slant in the floors. My room got unlucky and I shared a similar fate to most of the other guys on my floor. But as with everything there is always a brighter side of things, in fact, there were two.
1) We found out that in a case of a fire, the sprinkler system would be quite effective in dousing the fire.
2) I was able to get most of my stuff off the floor before i got out of the building and my stuff went largely unscathed and also there was only 1cm of water in my room.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, they got our floor temporarily fixed up, sucked out most of the water and re-did the plumbing. The only thing now is that our floor smells like a wet dog mixed in with an old man odour... it's a tragic, but then again, it's not too bad in the whole scheme of things. bring on the air-freshener

posted by Lemdog @ 8:32 AM