Fire Alarms in My Building - Totally Scary

My building has hard wired fire alarms. A smoke detector in any unit can activate the whole building's alarm. And it is loud.

This very loud alarm is working though because it went off today. At 7:00pm or so. It's gone off a couple times before but stopped after a few seconds. So I went out into the hall just to do a cursory inspection. And I was met with a ton of smoke.

(Where is my cell phone!?!)

I called 911. It started out as a calm call until I started looking around my apartment for things to take out to my car incase the place really did catch fire. I might have made the 911 operator a little nervous when I mentioned it was a 3 story building with 12 units. Four fire trucks came.

As I was on the phone with the operator some other neighbors came by and said it was a cooking fire. It did smell like grease. Well, I guess not fire so much as cooking error where the grease smoked like mad. (Doh.)

So the fire department showed up. (Why no one else called 911 I have no idea. Seriously, they don't mind false alarms. Just freaking call.) The fireman and firelady inspected the unit and the fire alarm system. The first truck waived off the rest of the trucks so we only met those two.

And then I met my new neighbor Zack who apologized to all us for the excitement. (Welcome to the building dude.) A baby-boomer-ish aged neighbor came down while Zack was explaining he'd tried to fry catfish. "You need cooking lessons." Thank god someone can laugh about it. I was still pretty freaked out.

I also wish I'd met Zack for the first time wearing something other than sweatpants and an overlarge shirt. (Yes, I was settled in my comfy clothes for a night of doing nothing.) My vanity can suffer for my personal safety.

A friend told me I should offer Zack cooking lessons.