Oh, you know... Had an Economics revision lesson, put out a room on fire, got a physical after suffering smoke inhalation. You know, the usual...

Pinch me if I'm dreaming, but suddenly, school is becoming surreal and... well, interesting! Yes, today there was a fire at school.

It was lunchtime - more or less a usual lunch-time. Hang around with my mates, joke about.
Anyway, Lunch is about to finish, and we go back to our common room - for some reason, I get distracted and start talking to someone just outside the Guys' Bathroom (just to one side of the common room). One of my mates (Lucas) decides he'll go to the bathroom just before classes start.

Smelling something burning, I turn around to see Lucas leaving the bathroom quickly with a look of disbelief on his face. Someone opens the door, and I get my first look at what's going on. It's as if all the usually well-lit room is in complete darkness - you couldn't even see the lights on the roof the smoke was that thick.
I race over to get a fire extinguisher while Mark gets another. Toddy, a Country Fire Authority trained Fireman (fights the big Australian bushfires every year) grabs the fire extinguisher from Mark and tells him to run around the back of the building and knock out the back windows on the other side of the bathroom. We get someone to hold the door open for us while we arm the extinguishers, duck under the thick black smoke and take aim. Toddy's fire extinguisher starts fine, but then splutters and fails. Mine has steady pressure, so Toddy steps out of the way. It was impossible to see where the water was going, at first we were just spraying and listening for the violent hiss of water on fire. As the smoke started to lift and leave slowly, we began to see the flames on the other side of the room. The fire had probably started at around waist height, because flaming pieces of...something kept falling.
I kept low, and walked towards the fire to try and put it out at the source, but the room was filled with dizzying carbon monoxide, it was hard to see, and there was a banging noise coming from somewhere near the fire (it later turned out to be Mark trying to break the window) so I got the hell out!

Last I saw, the fire was still burning - but someone must have finished putting it out just before they sealted the room.

Apparently, what happened was someone decided it was a good end-of-year prank to set fire to a roll of toilet paper in one of those big plastic toilet roll dispensers in a cubicle. When I saw the flaming bits of "something" falling from waist level, it turned out that it was the plastic toilet roll dispenser melting off the wall. The fire must have been going a while to fill the room with smoke, and to melt the toilet dispenser off the wall.

Interesting day.
The check-up for smoke inhalation was fun. But I'm still black and sooty, have crud up my nose and in all over my face.

I wonder what will happen tomorrow... Life is making dreaming redundant. Compared to life, imagination is starting to seem bland and mundane.

*Note to Self; find a copy of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" to play in the year-level common room tomorrow at lunchtime :)*