Fighting fire (plus the best secret-shop ever)

Have you ever had to fight a fire? I have. In fact, when I worked at the motel, I had to fight two fires.

The first one happened when someone flicked a cigarette into our flowerbeds and caught a hedge on fire. I ran out there with a fire extinguisher, used up the fire extinguisher, but didn't get the flames out. A guest was like, "There! There's another one!". So I ran over and used the empty fire extinguisher I was holding to bust the glass to get the other extinguisher out, which was one of the most bad-ass moves I feel I ever did (it was very satisfying to do, trust me), and then ran back and got the rest of the fire out.

The second fire was indoors. I was in the back office doing paperwork things and heard popping and burning smell from the breakroom, and I assumed it was my coworker burning popcorn again and ignored it...until I realized that the microwave wasn't actually running.

Went back to check while my coworker was on the phone, and where our a/c was plugged into the wall there were sparks. I pulled the cord out of the wall...and flames shot out of the electrical outlet. Welllllllll shit.

"Fire!" I screamed as I grabbed a cleaning rag and tried to shove it against the outlet to smother the flames. "Get me an extinguisher and call 911!"

Coworker: "Just a minute..."
Me: "No just a minute I need an extinguisher right now!"

She came back with an extinguisher and I put out the fire. Unsure of what was still possibly burning in the wall, we evacuated the building, or at least attempted to since the guests didn't seem to really believe there was a fire. The fire department came and determined that the fire was put out. The breaker never tripped, and when an electrician came out he swore at how poorly-labelled our circuit-breaker was (something I had complained to the higher-ups about multiple times to no avail).

Now, to provide some background, my company at the time was having us do "quality control" checks on other random properties. Some genius at corporate thought we should waste time calling other properties to make fake reservations and then fill out a form and grade the other property and fax it to them. I say "genius" sarcastically since it's looks terrible if you're a guest who walks up to to check-in and see the front desk person is on the phone booking a room somewhere, but I digress.

Anyway, the phone call my coworker was taking when the fire broke out? It was another property secret-shopping us. My coworker basically asked to call the other person back and hung up. She never said why, but the person on the other end of the line must have heard me screaming in the background, because after the fire department left our secret-shop "grade" was faxed to us.

(Can't believe I still have this photo from 2013)

The comments read:
"She was doing great 'till you guys had a fire at the property. Hope everything is OK!"

And then I laughed. And laughed. And laughed...

Best secret shop we ever had!