And the winner is... a fire alarm?

Here we are, waiting patiently to announce who the winner is. But wait! Once I announce the winner, will my readers stick around for the remainder of this post? Hmmm... I’m going to be sneaky about this, give out a blog award, and make everyone wade through my rambling to find out who the winner is because, well, I have a few interesting things to discuss today.

First off, what’s with the title of this post?

If you are wondering, it has to do with my new job - which I suppose isn’t all that new anymore. I’ve officially survived my first month there. In celebration, the entire business almost burnt to the ground.

Almost.

Darn.

It happened Friday night. My job involves a lot of phone work. No, I’m not a telemarketer. It’s so much worse than that. Technically, I’m a debt collector. Muwhahahaha!

Anyway, I was just reaching the final hour of my shift. I hung up on my one hundred and fifty-third guy who was doing some serious flirting since I have this breathy, sultry voice that makes housewives think I’m some type of sex-phone operator who her husband got too personal with while he... uh... how do I put this delicately? ...while he inspected his toothpick.

(No. This isn’t a joke. I’ve had guys flirt with me over the phone. I’ve had suspicious wives angrily ask why I was calling for their husbands. I’ve heard the clicks and echoes as if a second phone was being picked up to listen to the conversation. During my training, my instructor did a bit of role-playing with everyone. With me, he pretended to be a flirting guy to see how I would react to the situation - letting me know I would experience such because of the sound of my voice. This is the major reason why I hate talking on the phone - despite thinking I sound childlike.)

Okay. Let’s get back to the title of the post. As I was hanging up on the guy who kept calling me, “honey,” the fire alarm went off. A suspicious smell suddenly hung in the air. An ethereal female voice sounded through the speakers, prerecorded, telling us to evacuate the floor. As we moved toward the doors to head down the several flights of stairs, a coworker saw smoke coming from the ceiling tiles by the door.

We hightailed our butts out of there, went down to the first floor, and debated if we should all go to one of the bars in the building and get plastered while waiting for the fire department to show up.

Oh, yeah, maybe I should explain something about the location where I work. We rent a floor, along with five other businesses, in one section of a giant plaza - sort of like a mall. The rest of the building space consists of a nursing school, a Japanese restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a fondue restaurant, a regular food court, a book store, several regular restaurants, and numerous bars along with sports clothes’ shops.

Anyway, we debated if we should go get drunk since it didn’t seem as if the security officers were going to evacuate everyone from the building and we also looked like a bunch of morons standing there on a Friday night while regular customers walked past wondering what was happening.

To make this long story a bit shorter, the fire department showed up. They didn’t find any flames although they said they smelled the odor - like an electrical fire that went out on its own. They inspected the floor and said everything was fine for us to return. We morons went back upstairs to stand by our cubicles doing nothing for the remaining ten minutes as we made jokes about the supervisors smoking on their crackpots and setting off the fire alarm. Then we clocked out and got drunk.

Well, maybe everyone else did. I went home and found caution tape surrounding my apartment building since half the siding was covered in sheets of ice from the frozen gutters. Or rather, the gutters were unfreezing, sending the sheets of ice downward to smack more drunk people heading to their cars from the bars near my apartment. I snuck under the tape, unlocked the door, and headed into my place. There, I emptied out the water from four large milk crates lined with garbage bags that I had placed by the kitchen windows under all the leaks in the ceiling.

Such is the day in the life of me.

Now, if everyone survived that little tale of mine, I have a blog award to give out. CatladyLarew  from  "How to become a cat lady... without the cats" gave me a “Beautiful Blogger” award this weekend.

There’s a whole bunch of rules to go along with it - maybe 156 of them. No, I take that back. I think there is only 4. I’ll copy/paste them below.
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1. Thank, then link to the person that gave you the award

2. Pass this award on to 7 bloggers you've recently discovered and whom you think are fantastic

3. Contact said Blogs to let them know they've won.

4. State 7 Things about yourself!
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When it comes to awards, there are times when I follow the rules and times when I don’t. This is going to be one of the times when I “sort of” won’t. I will thank the person who gave me the award and link to them.

Thank you, Catladylarew!

But I’m not going to pick seven bloggers, since I’ve been uber-busy and not visiting blogland as often as I used to so I can meet new people. So I plan on giving it to ONE PERSON. This individual isn’t the person who won the contest. Yet he was mentioned several times by other readers who said they would like the pendant to go to him if they won. Their unselfish acts makes him deserve to be mentioned right now.

This award goes to my dear friend, Suldog, who I know just loves getting these and gushing flowery prose about the wonderful giver. You deserve it, my lighter gray friend. No need to thank me. The expression I'm imagining on your face is thanks enough. Besides, you should really thank the people who wanted you to get the pendant. If they hadn't mentioned it, I probably would have gone ahead and just picked several random people to get the award, more than likely those people who dropped your name to me in the comments section for the contest. If anything, you should gush your well-known, robustful prose about them!

As for telling seven strange things about myself, I believe my fire alarm story satisfies those rules. Well, that’s it with this post. Thanks for stopping by everyone! Be back later this week when I do another of my "Fractured Fairytales" featuring Cinderalla's therapy sessions. Or perhaps ol' fogey Miss Michelle will regale the neighborhood children with another of her tales while setting it to some headbanging music. I'll see you then.

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What? I still have to announce the winner? But I already did. Weren’t you paying attention? Okay. I’ll go back and do a recap. Here was the first clue:

Anyway, I was just reaching the final hour of my shift. I hung up on my one hundred and fifty-third guy who was doing some serious flirting since I have this breathy, sultry, voice that makes housewives think I’m some type of sex-phone operator who her husband got too personal with while he... uh... how do I put this delicately? ...while he inspected his toothpick

There were 153 toothpicks in the container. Here was the second clue:

Now, if everyone survived that little tale of mine, I have a blog award to give out. CatladyLarew gave me a “Beautiful Blogger” award this weekend. There’s a whole bunch of rules to go along with it - maybe 156 of them

Catladylarew won the pendant with her closest guess of 156.

See, I told you I would sneak it into this post just to make you read the whole thing! Catladylarew, please drop your snail mail address to me so I can ship out your prize tomorrow before the next snowstorm hits and my apartment roof collapses.

Thanks everyone for your guesses! I’m going to get drunk now!