So you think you're having a bad day...

Before you complain about how bad your day has been, consider this poor young woman and how her day ended.

In my office this afternoon, laminating and trimming covers for a proposal, I started smelling smoke. I looked around the corner of the wall from where the trimmer sits to make sure the laminator, which has a working temperature of 330 degrees, wasn't on fire. It wasn't the laminator.

I opened the back door and the entire back courtyard area of the office building was full of smoke and it seemed to get more dense toward the dumpster. I ran out to make sure something in the dumpster wasn't on fire and it wasn't that either.

As I turned around to head back into the office I saw a plume of smoke rising above the building, coming from out front. I ran out to the lobby to see firemen and police working on putting the fire out as students from the school in the adjacent suite, where this lady was a student, scrambbling to move their cars away from hers.

I was too late to take photos of my own, so coworker Wilma Minor-Davis passed these photos on, taken on her Blackberry Storm, for me to post about. Turns out that coworkers had been trying to page me to take photos of the event, but while trimming and laminating like I was, I always wear my iPod and never heard the page on the loud speaker.

From this day forward, whenever I am at the laminating or trimming stations, you can bet I will only have one ear bud in.