If any of you saw my frantic Twittering today, you’ll have figured out that my office flooded this morning. Happy Friday the 13th!

My office is on the 3rd floor of one of the oldest parts of the hospital complex. On the 6th floor this morning, some electrical contractors futzing with stuff in the ceiling accidentally set off a sprinkler. I was gone from my desk for about 5 minutes, and when I came back my officemate was frantically throwing binders into the hall and covering everything with garbage bags. KP was frantic; her scrubs were soaked and her hair was wet. It was not just seeping, it was running through the ceiling in about eight different places.

It was actually kind of cool.

We corralled the friends in the office suite and started passing things out into the hall – binders, picture frames, anything that wouldn’t fit in our cabinets. I was standing on my desk pulling boxes down from the shelves. We covered the computers and phones and printer with the garbage bags and started spreading bags on the floor to keep the carpet from soaking it all up. In about ten minutes, the ceiling tiles on one side of the office looked about ready to cave in, and the drips were moving across the room toward the wall to another office. Soon everything was running down onto the file cabinet and we moved into the next office, hauling things out and garbage-bagging the rest.

“What the heck happened?” everyone asked.

A maintenance team showed up and told us about the sprinkler on the 6th floor. With help at hand and as much of my stuff moved and covered as possible, I walked up the steps to see how bad the floor above us had it.

Their ceiling was wet. That’s it.

Up again to the 5th floor. A little damp, and some seepage from the ceiling.

On the 6th floor there was standing water and chaos as patients were evacuated and monitors screeched. I walked back downstairs and asked how on earth we got drenched when 4 and 5 got less than a drizzle.

“Wait, I heard there was standing water up on 4,” said my boss as he balanced on KP’s desk and tried to hold up the ceiling.

I told him what I had seen and he shook his head in disbelief. The maintenance guys shrugged and started in on the floor with the water extractors. As the rain slowly subsided, people from housekeeping, Environmental Health, Security and Facilities Maintenance plodded in and out of the suite, asking us questions and having us look for damage to report.

“Um, our ceiling died,” I pointed out as someone climbed up to peel the soaked tiles from the frames. The tile that looked the worst just disintegrated in his hands.

“I mean personal articles,” said the lady drily.

“My clothes got wet,” said KP.

She looked at us funny.

“Did you SEE that stuff?” said KP, pointing at one of the rusty-colored puddles that had formed on a trash bag.

“The sprinklers,” I added helpfully, “do not use filtered water.”

“Okay, so… clothes, then.” She made a note on her paper.

Both of our computers survived, but KP’s phone refused to work and we feared that our big printer, having borne the brunt of the initial shower before being bagged, might be a dead loss. When the tiles came down, it began to reek in there. Like I said, it wasn’t filtered water… having traveled through two floors of who-knows-what in the walls it had gotten disgusting, and above the tiles it smelled like something had died. The carpet was already beginning to emit some sort of rank odor. We sifted through the mess (how did water get into a CLOSED file cabinet anyway?) and mopped up our stuff with towels and blankets pilfered from the linen carts in the recovery room and the ORs, sighing every time we discovered another folder that had soaked through or heard our feet make squishy noises on the carpet.

I packed up my laptop and a few essentials in my little rolly case and headed up to the IS office where I knew they had a few empty cubicles, and spent the afternoon as a squatter. When I wandered back down to change out of my scrubs at the end of the day, the floor trim had been ripped off the walls and a giant fan and HEPA filter were sitting in the middle of my floor. A trash can was catching one last mysterious drip.

There are two lessons to be learned here. One is to never, ever think that printing a copy of something and putting it in a file is “backing up your work.” The other is to believe that even when your life seems like it sucks, even when you find yourself feeling like you’re unable to face another day, you should still get up and go to work. You might end up with a good story to tell and a smile on your face.