I have some fire stories. First one, I was temping at a start up that had gone from 40 to 200 people in 2 months and no one knew anyone anymore. The company had the classic start-up kitchen: free chips and candy bars, soda and water in the fridge with beer on the bottom shelf with a sign that said “For Fridays only.” The kitchen had a dishwasher, microwave, hotplate and toaster oven. So one day, I hear the VP of Marketing yelling. I sniff and look up and there are clouds of smoke roiling across the ceiling. The VP had set his bagel on fire in the toaster oven and was demanding to know whose job it was to empty out the crumb tray. :smack: How about you check before toasting? I laughed and laughed (no one was hurt, except the VP’s pride) because temps can get away with that.
Second story, my grandfather owns a business with his brother and their HQ is gorgeous, perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean and my grandfather’s personal airstrip, with huge floor to ceiling windows all the way around. They used to have a firepit with a large woodstove in the middle of the office, and that was their primary source of heat. It was the responsibility of the first person in the office to start the fire in the morning in wintertime. So, they had a new secretary and sure, she knew how to start a fire, no problem. Well, the day came when she was the first one in. She grabbed the scratch papers from the to-be-burned-pile and stuffed the stove full of paper and lit the fire. Well, you know what happens when you light an all-paper fire in a wood stove. All the paper flies up the stovepipe, usually still on fire. She lit the roof on fire. And *then * she panicked. Luckily, the company’s fire truck is parked near the building anyway, so the only damage was a slightly singed roof and a melted stovepipe. The poor woman was so mortified, she never came back to work again.
Ooh, a third fire story. My grandfather’s company again. Plumbing is limited out on the factory site (they’re a long, long way from anywhere, even now.) So they have outhouses all around and then they have to walk to the lunchroom to wash their hands. (My mom told me they finally got plumbing last year, so she doesn’t have to hold it all day anymore.) Since 99.9% of the workforce is male, you can imagine how nasty those outhouses get. To facilitate cleaning, they are made entirely of concrete and steel. They are generally cleaned by standing at least 5 feet from the door, using a fire hose. So one day, oh, let’s call him Jean-Claude, my mom’s future ex-boyfriend, decided that the fire hose just wasn’t getting that outhouse clean enough. So he sloshed about a gallon of gasoline around the outhouse and threw a match. That was one sanitary outhouse, after they scraped all the soot off. 
Actually, I’ve got lots of stories about my grandfather’s company, from the hooker van, to the reason the employee bathroom ended up with a 16-wheeler size hole in the wall, to spontaneous combustion, to the Rolling Stones concert, to the poet in residence. Oh, lots of things. If you want to hear 'em, I can share 'em.
FCM I am envious of your studio! It’s beautemous. I’ve never been in a maze of corn, but I think there’s one within driving distance. I’ll have to look around this summer, it sounds like fun. I loved running through cornfields when I was little.
