On Monday, our work day ended in drama. There's a new upscale retail/condo development about a city-block from my office, and that afternoon it literally went up in smoke, ultimately becoming an eight-alarm fire. It was breezy that day, and as a result, burning embers were carried across the neighborhood.

From our office windows, we watched the flames from the main fire, and from a burning apartment complex across the street, and we watched clouds of brown and black and grey smoke turning a sunny afternoon into temporary twilight. And we debated leaving early, or staying to watch.

Eventually, embers landed on our building, and the guys from my office went up to hose everything down, just as we were told to bail. E. told me later, as we sat in traffic for an hour on the way to my home two miles away(he gave me a ride), that at one point, with the hose in use on the other side of the building, and a mass of burning stuff at his feet he resorted to dropping his pants and weilding a hose of a different sort, only after the fact realizing that he was in full view of the freeway below.

Of course, an hour later, we found this hilarious. Hell, it was probably hilarious there.

Halfway home, stuck in the slow crawl of people fleeing the affected neighborhood, and people being re-routed around the same neighborhood, we watched the SWAT team and still more firetrucks heading toward the main blaze, and as one we started giggling, for there, directly in front of us, was a car with the following license plate:
PYROFAN

Two days later, there's still a faint smoky smell in the office, but I'm not entirely sure it isn't just my over-active imagination.

Still, if all Mondays held such drama…well, they'd still be Mondays.