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.