Psst, Hey, I'm downstairs.

Sometimes it’s just not your day. Today was not my Captains day. My regular Captain was off and they had to mandatory a captain to work the shift. It was a captain I knew well and looked forward to working with even though he wasn’t thrilled to be mando’d.

We got toned out right away for a strange smell in an apartment, possibly electrical. When we arrived at the apartment and knocked no one answered. We knocked louder and still no answer.
The captain called dispatch to get the phone number of the reporting party. He called and a woman answered saying yes she had called 9-1-1 but she was at work now. Odd. She said her husband is home but he is a sound sleeper. My captain asked what bedroom he was in and she told us it was upstairs in the back.

We went around to the backyard and saw a sliding glass door off of the upstairs balcony. Now, we could have put a ladder up to it and just knocked on the window but no one really wanted to risk getting shot by a startled home owner. I climbed up onto the fence to see if perhaps a bottom floor access was available. It wasn’t. So, my captain decided to resort to the tricks of a twelve year old boy who has snuck out to see his girlfriend at midnight and throw rocks at the man’s window. He picked up a couple of pebbles and attempted to hit the slider. He kept missing and the stones were just bouncing off the rails of the balcony. I politely reminded him that for this plan to work he actually had to hit the window. He replied, “This really isn’t gonna be my day is it?”. He picked up another pebble and lobbed it up...at which point the sliding glass door exploded. I’m not kidding, I’ve never seen a window shatter like that. The entire thing blew out and came down in a billion little pieces. I realized I was still sitting on the man’s fence and didn’t want to appear to be the guilty party and jumped down just as a very sleepy looking man poked his head out of the large vacant space where his slider used to be. My mortified captain said, “First, I’m sorry. Second, you’re wife called us.”



We checked the apartment and found no trace of an electrical smell or problem of any kind. We alerted the BC as to what had happened and he brought us a shop-vac to clean up all the glass. The homeowner took it very well and even invited us to lunch at his restaurant (we didn’t go). When we had finished vacuuming up all the glass we noticed a crib right by the slider with a sleeping child in it. This kid hadn’t woken up when the door shattered or the entire time we were running the shop-vac three feet away from him. I guess he takes after his dad.