6996

One week after the fire incident, I was back at the hotel. Glad as I could be for getting my job back, I knew I had a lot of self-redemption to do. It was very unlikely for a 21 year old computer science graduate to be working a job as mine, I wasn't exactly proud of it, but it was something to keep busy.

I should tell you about the fire. No? I will all the same.

It was a Cold Sunday noon. I was just sitting and surfing YouTube for videos of the funny sort. I needed to laugh, laugh the cold out of my system. It had been boring. I found a few. 'how to ride a bike backwards', 'how to bake a cake without flour', 'when my car was stuck in a tree', 'top 10 wacky races'- This one gave me a bit of a rib ache. Two corvettes met at a traffic light and decided they should engage on a race to win the "my corvette is better than yours". As the light turn green, it was GO! Sadly, the two cars barely made it to 50m, they crashed into each other. The winner of the competition turned out to be the driver of the car behind them who posted the video on YouTube.  That was No. 10. I saw a couple of other videos and then I decided my laptop screen was too small, such stupidity should be viewed on a wider screen. In that vein, I transformed my office into my personal cinema. For hours unend, I watched the craziest, stupidest and downright dumb people show off their talents, when you're that good at something, even though it's not appreciated to other people, it's a talent. There was this one where a boyfriend took his girlfriend on a rather unusual date. they were going to take a rope swing off a canyon. He did it with ease as he was not a first-timer. His girlfriend, on the other hand, was scared. It was her first time. She wouldn't jump off even after more than 10 takes. Out of frustration probably, the boyfriend decided to help ease her fear with encouragements, emphasizing he wouldn't push her as she had suspected. After getting her gently close enough to the edge, with one sharp move, he pushed her off. He got dumped, temporarily at least until she was on land again. At this point, I had lost feeling in my ribs, cheeks, throat. Tears streamed down my eyes and I could barely breathe.

I finally decided to get off my "break" and return back to work. On tuning back to work monitors, I was staring at chaos. People running up and down, water spraying down on panicking children. My gut failed and though, apparently safe, I began to panic. There had been a fire.

"Where, when, how?" Questions I had no answers to.

I searched for feeds, footage. Nothing. Any moment from now, the Director would ask for me and I had been negligent. Few minutes after my premonition, he called.

"Solange, there was a fire on your floor. Report?"

I found my answer! Thank God for Google.

"Sir, it was a rather unusual case of a pseudo-fire accident. The honey-mooners were in the middle of something when the groom pinned her to the fire alarm. The rest is pretty straightforward, sir."

"That is hilarious. What room?"

"6996."

I had just watched my last funny video of the day.