For many people, University is the best time of their lives, but for me it almost turned into a disaster when I lost all my work.
Sharing accommodation with a careless room mate can be really bad. Since we are both girls, and like to dress up a bit before walking to class (the university is just fifteen minutes walk down the road), the room is usually strewn with clothes in the morning. We also keep our books, DVDs, flash drives, cell phones lying around the place. I make it a point to clean up as much as I can on Saturday morning, but my room mate is just hopeless. Since I do not have a laptop, I need to take the Saturday morning off to dump everything into my desktop, and take some backups in DVDs. All this is manageable mess. But smoking at night and going off to sleep with the butt still glowing on the floor is just disastrous, and that is just what my room mate did.
The Damage
The smoke woke us up. Initially, we were just too scared and confused, and it took us sometime to realise that there was a fire in the apartment – exactly at the corner we call our ‘study’. Our first instinct was to try to put out the flames. The tiny flat was filling up rapidly with smoke, but we could see that the door was still clear. Unfortunately, there was a pile of dirty laundry exactly at the door of the toilet, and this stopped us from getting water from there to douse the fire. Around this time, my friend’s laptop cell phone began to make sounds much like sizzling. She grabbed the blanket from our bed and threw it on top of her phone and laptop. It was a heavy drape, and the fire seemed to have subsided somewhat. Taking the clue from this, we tried out the three other blankets, and dragged down the new, heavy curtains we had put up. It had cost us a small fortune, but all we wanted to do now was douse the fire before the things we valued most were burnt to crisps. Approximately half an hour later, the flames had gone out, and our landlord was trying to figure out how it all happened.
Luck and Mistakes
We began to take stock of the damages now. My computer was black and my cell phone looked as if it had been put into the microwave. My friend’s phone was in sadder state, the buttons had fused together with heat. Our flash drives were looking like burnt peanuts. There was nothing to be done about our books and notepads; they had disappeared like autumn leaves in the blaze. I wanted to do something violent to my friend; it was all her fault after all. But she was close to tears at the sight of her laptop – which was definitely not silver any longer – and I felt that making her feel worse won’t help me to get back what I had lost. The computer was still too hot to be moved, but I picked up my USB drives and the phone by wrapping them in my towel and two of my coats. My friend lifted her laptop wrapped in her dressing gown, and took it to the bathroom, where she tried to dip it into the bucket. When it didn’t fit, she poured water on it till it cooled off.