Something to think about on your Friday. This was forwarded to me from a coworker — kind of a “friend of a friend” thing. Names changed to protect the, uh, participants. We’re kind of co-supervisors, He helps keep me sane…

When I walked into the office today, there was a, uh, vehicle a bit out of place.  It’s not everyday that we have a burned out car sitting in our parking lot — not in this neighborhood:

Clearly, something went wrong. Maybe a fuel line ruptured and it spilled enough gas on a hot manifold to ignite. There’s more to the story — and a few more photos below.

The following is based entirely on hearsay:

The car belongs to a member of our help desk, who had been on shift for a few hours by the time this happened. He was pretty much the only person here this morning, so the lot was virtually empty.

We have a number of contractors on site to help out with call volume due to increased load. When people started to flow in, one of the contractors came in and asked, “Hey, who owns a Dodge Monaco?”

Nobody replied, so he sent an email.

Wait. It gets better.

After the employee — who had been on the phone with a customer — was free, he said, “I have one — why?”

The contractor said, “Well, it’s on fire.”

“Well, did you call 911?” he asked.

“No, but I sent an email.”

“Okay, but did you call 911?”

“Well, no — but when I sent the email, it got rejected because I’m not allowed to send out to that distro.”

** face ** palm **

The really sad part is that the contractor walked past two fire extinguishers on the way to his desk to send an email and not call 911.

Here’s a tip: If you see an actual car fire, call 911. Don’t ask, “Hey, who owns…” just call 911.

Here’s a bonus tip: Fire extinguishers work really well on small fires… before they get out of hand.

Update: there’s also now video… which has brought our Exchange server to its knees for about an hour while people passed it around in email. I don’t know how badly Google’s encoder will butcher this, so I’ll see about getting the original MPG uploaded for your entertainment as well.

Just watch.

NSFW tune, but catchy nonetheless:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1IxOS4VzKM

Turn it up.

And, on the topic of Ray Bradbury, he shared his views of government and society recently.

I’ve read Bradbury — though it’s been a few years. Imagine: a science fiction writer who spun tales of a dystopian societies ruled by even more dysfunctional governments — living long enough to see it start to actually happen.

I’m going to unplug for awhile.

Cool until something goes wrong, that is:

From theChive. Probably borrowed from somewhere else.

Pac-Man — I played it. Lots. I can’t fathom the number of quarters I dropped into various Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man games when I was a kid. Spotted this somewhere out there in the World Wide Weird:

Click to enlarge.

Don’t forget, there’s also the Google-ized version of Pac-Man to play with while you search.