Burning down the house

The cosmos may be sending me a message. I think the gist of it is 'you should have stayed in bed.'

Unfortunately, the opening line of this message didn't arrive in time for me to actually stay in bed. It didn't arrive until I was 7 miles down the highway and traffic came to a stop because someone had accordion-pleated the front end of their Corvette.

I was, at the time, mostly grateful that I was only in the backup and not in the accident. Wading through traffic isn't fun, but I do it often enough that it isn't especially painful, either.

Then I got to work, where the computer networks were down, and didn't come back up for another hour and half. No sooner had they done so then one of the security guards was seen dashing from cubicle to cubicle, informing people that the floor was being evacuated and we should all go down to the lobby.

What?

Have we no fire alarms? Have we no public address systems?

This became even stranger when the word circulated that the cause of all this was a 'small fire that we have contained.' A colleague confirms that one of the fluorescent ceiling fixtures caught fire. How, she did not know, but she saw the flames.

What?

All six floors are routinely evacuated and the fire department summoned when someone burns popcorn in the microwave. Indeed, the whole building, including the day care centre, was evacuated on the coldest day of the year last January for nothing more than a candy wrapper tossed into a sconce. How is it then that when there is an actual fire, only one floor is evacuated and we're told to stand in the lobby?

Also strange: generally building evacuations are followed by snarky emails from facilities management, reminding us not to burn popcorn, toss candy wrappers into sconces, or set the building on fire in any other way. There have been no such messages from facilities.

I do not understand. All I know is this managed to consume my entire morning. I think I should have stayed in bed.