What is an inlet of the sea called anyway?

Last month while at work, in our old early 1900ish stone building that has no heat and use to be a meat packing plant in its early days and now houses a winery and us - during that week where it was 28 degrees in Berkeley, my coworker and I were working, in our down jackets and hats and scarves and wool attire, when I went downstairs to bare my ass to the frigidness to go pee.

And then I smelled smoke.



And as I was peeing I thought to myself, oh how nice, someone somewhere close by has started a nice little wood fire in this chilly weather and they're enjoying the warmth. And then I went back upstairs to sit on my personal space heater, while I processed payroll and wrote checks.



But as I was climbing back up the steps I realized that the smoke was getting stronger. And I could almost see it. And just as I rounded to corner to the final few stairs to tell my coworker that I smelled smoke, he said said something about not having any electricity on his side of the building.



And then we discovered it, just as we turned around to go back down to see where the smoke was coming from, there it was, a little electrical fire - with smoke and sparks and everything.

So we did the fire dance.



You know the one, where you circle around each other and say out loud while laughing nervously what should we do, what should we do, when you know full well what you should do. And then you realize your phone isn't on your person because, well after all, you were just going downstairs to go pee. But thankfully your coworker DID grab his phone, because he has an iPhone and iPhone people never go anywhere without their phone, even if it's just to put chili in the microwave. And so we did what we were supposed to do, and pressed the app to call 911. And then we went outside to wait.



And my coworker tried to make me guess what his rapper alias was by rapping about electrical fires and canned chili and pop chips and V8.




The fire people arrived within four minutes. And blocked off our street. With four hook and ladder trucks. And three smaller trucks. And four police cars. And axes and hammers and radios and chopping things and stuff like that. I felt a bit guilty. They'd sent so many resources for such a tiny fire. So many fire men. Such a little fire. And all of them running around, looking for something more. We were a disappointment.

They put our fire out. And told us not to plug so many space heaters into one socket. Because it overloads things. And turned off the electricity to the entire building. And then they left.