"are you a rocket scientist?"

so the most hilarious thing happened today at school. I was sitting in my office, working on some stuff on my computer, when all of a sudden my advisor (in the adjoining office) starts freaking out about something. Jen went in to investigate what the disturbance was, but she didn't really say anything except, "oh crap" or something to that effect. so, now, Brian and I are intrigued and walk in there and we see that the entire office is filled with smoke and smells completely awful.

so it turns out that our advisor was making some popcorn in the microwave and just trusted the machine to know when to stop popping. it was a smaller than normal bag and I'm guessing that the microwave didn't know or care. anyway, it caught on fire and since the microwave was sitting on a cardboard box, it started to catch that on fire too. around this point, our advisor saw the smoke and realized something bad was happening and proceeded to freak out. Brian came in, unplugged the microwave and took it out to the stairwell while Jen and I and our advisor started to get the smoke out of the room. we were afraid the fire alarm and/or the sprinklers would go off, both things being not fun situations to be in. apparently when Brian opened up the microwave, there was some yellow gas that rushed out (probably the butter?). luckily he didn't get burned or anything.

here's a picture of the guilty microwave (and the bag of scorched popcorn):


so then our advisor decided that she had to call the campus police and tell them what happened. they called the fire department and sent them over. we were expecting at the most one truck with a couple guys to make sure that everything was ok and that nothing was still burning, etc. she explicitly told them on the phone that nothing was still on fire and that there was just some smoke (and an awful smell). so, a few minutes later (and we are still laughing hysterically at this point), we hear some fire engines. multiple ones. and we're like, oh crap, did they really send a bunch of trucks for this?

well, I guess the fire department was fairly bored today, because apparently they sent over four trucks (although we think they may have been exaggerating - we only saw two). three firemen, in full gear, carrying hoses, tanks and long hook things, came up the stairs a little bit later to see what was actually going on. once they saw the microwave, they started radioing in "popcorn in microwave" over and over again. and then they started making fun of our advisor. they were like, "are you a professor here"? and "are you a rocket scientist"? we were like, well, she's a physicist. and they started laughing. and we started laughing. it was really funny. they were giving her a really hard time about it, which made it even funnier. she was a pretty good sport about the whole thing, but definitely won't be hearing the last of it for a while.

the firetrucks:


so, all in all, it was an interesting afternoon at work. I would like to point out, that even though it was a tiny bag of popcorn and our office is on the fifth floor, the smell permeated all the way down onto the first floor. I think our office will smell bad for at least a week.