A few years ago, my wife and I were at an event and in the middle of a story, she casually mentioned, "Yeah, that happened the same year our house caught on fire". Although she finished what she was saying, people were more curious about how the house caught on fire. So she deferred to me, as I had told the story before.
It starts out with my wife, cleaning the shower in our upstairs bathroom and she noticed a small wheel on the floor of the shower. It was about an inch across and it was kind of dirty. When she picked it up, she realized that it was from the bottom of the sliding glass doors on the shower, which was also dirty. She figured that the door would have to come off the shower to fix the wheel and the door would also need to be cleaned. So, she removed the door and muscled it into the bath tub next to the shower.
She turned the water on in the bath tub and began to look for some bleach or other cleaning supplies to help clean the glass door. Well, as things would have it, the bleach wasn't readily available, our daughter was asking for help with something and a million other things needed to be done. Consequently, the tub filled up and for some reason the overflow valve did not work. The water began to spill out of the tub and onto the floor.
The water spilled for quite some time. A while later I came home, and my wife was casually reading a magazine on the sofa. I was walking around the house and heard a strange sound downstairs. It vaguely sounded like a waterfall, or a splashing sound. I asked my wife if she heard it and she said, "no". A calm minute passed and then a look of horror came over her. The look on her face was similar to what I assume people have when they are flying on a plane and the captain says, "Ah..., this is your captain speaking, it looks like we are going to crash".
The water had soaked through the bathroom floor and found its way through the garage down to the lower level of the house. We assessed the situation and realized that all the insulation in the garage ceiling and the lower level ceiling would need to be replaced. All the ceiling tiles in the lower level would need to be replaced and the whole thing would need to be dried out fast before any mold grew.
My wife is great, she took responsibility for the accident and said she was going to replace it all on her own. She setup fans to dry the area out, and went to Home Depot to equip herself for battle. She bought her own staple gun (pink), gloves, masks, trash bags, insulation, ceiling tiles and various other essentials. Wearing her face mask and gloves, she ripped out all the wet stuff. There were bags upon bags of wet insulation and soggy ceiling tiles, stacked by our trash cans. When everything dried out, she put the new insulation in place, and the last thing was to replace the ceiling tiles of the suspended ceiling in the lower level.
I was at the gym, three reps into a set of chest presses when my phone rang. It was my wife. I picked up the phone and she said, "I think the house may be on fire". From my perspective, you either know the house is on fire, or it is not, so I was a bit confused. She explained that the light had fallen as she put the ceiling tile in place and it made a spark. Apparently the spark ran through the frame for the ceiling tiles and ignited the new insulation paper on fire.
I drove rather quickly on the way home. When I pulled onto my street there were seven full sized fire trucks and about 50 firefighters walking around. (We have volunteer fire departments where I live, so everyone goes to a fire). When I got in the house, it was clear that the insulation had burned but my wife was able to put the fire out. The firefighters were checking the walls with an infrared handheld device to ensure all was OK. After several hours the firefighters started to leave. Everyone in my neighborhood had to walk by our house and everyone we ever knew called us on our mobile phones.
So, a one inch wheel was found on the floor of the shower and 50 firefighters end up walking around my house. In life, things will always go wrong, but the challenge is ensuring that a small thing doesn't become a bigger thing. If things go wrong at B2BGateway, I make sure my wife stays away.
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