I returned home on foot this evening, carrying various things. As I got back to the apartment complex and was going to enter by way of the vehicular gate, I saw and smelled what appeared to be a fire outside of the central front pedestrian gate, so I investigated.<\/p>
Yup, there was a small fire inside of what appeared to be a pylon or one of those tall butt receptacles, which was within an inch or so of the building, if not up against it.<\/p>
So I first got my phone to call emergency services. The first dispatcher switched me to a fire department dispatcher, who was a fool<\/em> following a flowchart. I started to tell him I thought that I heard a fire truck, so I waited, and one indeed arrived. They decided that the fire were extinguished, and so went on their way. The complex manager showed-up, so I explained the situation to her. Then a cop showed-up so I explained the situation to him. Satisfied, he too went on his way. The manager stayed to deal with the clean-up. I grabbed my things, went on to my apartment, and grumbled sub-vocally about inhaling things that I didn't want to inhale.<\/p> When I restarted my phone, I found that I had a message waiting. The dispatcher said that they needed me to call back to tell them what were on fire.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I returned home on foot this evening, carrying various things. As I got back to the apartment complex and was going to enter by way of the vehicular gate, I saw and smelled what appeared to be a fire outside of the central front pedestrian gate, so I investigated. Yup, there was a small fire […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,4],"tags":[1473],"class_list":["post-9038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-personal","category-public","tag-everyday-stupidity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}There's a small fire outside of 4050—<\/q> at which point he interrupted me to tell me that he needed my location. So I told him my location exactly as I'd begun doing when he interrupted me — I didn't note to him that I'd been doing just that — and I told him what was on fire. At this point, I wanted to put down what I was carrying, and go get a fire extinguisher, which meant getting off the phone. Of course, the fire was worsening and the burning object was collapsing in a way that could further fuel the flames. But the dispatcher was demanding my phone number
in case we get cut off<\/q>. I shouted at him that I'd told him what he needed to know, and wasn't going to stay on the phone with him. My phone set resisted my attempt to hang-up, so I turned it off. I got-out my keys, got through the gate, was interrupted by someone who told me that there were a fire, put my packages down, went (barking about stupidity) to a case near the elevator, retrieved a fire extinguisher, then returned to put-out the damn'd fire.<\/p>