So we're just hangin' out at home and then all of the sudden the entire kitchen and living room is filled with a thick terrible smelling smoke. Turns out a florescent light in the kitchen shorted and the plastic was smoldering. It happened really fast and I can't even imagine what would have resulted if we weren't here or if we were sleeping (as this seemed to prove the smoke alarm was broken).
The plastic casing for the tube florescent is in a large wooden rack that's close to the ceiling. I have no doubt that the rack would have caught fire and then possibly the ceiling and potentially entire building had we not been here. And 90 minutes later I'm still feeling nautious from the toxic plastic smoke so if we were asleep with all the windows closed we may have had other health worries as well even if the place didn't burn down.
It's pretty scary how quickly something like that can happen. Two rooms were literally filled with this awful smoke in what must have been only a minute or two as the smoke was billowing out of the light housing. There's nothing you can really do to prevent something from shorting out due to age, but our landlord is going to hear an earful tomorrow about the fact that there's no functional smoke detector in this place.
Of course we were playing Rock Band at the time (more on that later) so maybe the whole fire was simply a result of us rocking just a bit too hard...
