You know that feeling when you are on your way to work and you pass a fire truck with its lights and sirens blazing? You wonder if you left the iron and/or the stove on.  What have the kids done now? Did I pay the insurance premium? I tell myself to calm down and stop being paranoid. It has nothing to do with me.

But before I can even open the door to my office, my assistant is running toward me. She spins me around and screams to head straight to one of the apartments we manage because, you guessed it, IT’S ON FIRE.

By the time I arrive, the apartment is fully engulfed in flames and they have already knocked down the front door. Nobody was home, thank goodness. We call the tenants, a woman, and her adult son, to come home. The woman asks about her dog. Oh no.

The Fire Department starts a frantic search through the apartment for her dog.  The tenant shows up a few minutes later and begins wailing in the parking lot over the certain doom of her beloved pooch. It takes the Fire Department twenty minutes to finally announce that there is no dog, alive or dead, in the unit.

Her son had dropped off the dog (an unauthorized dog, I might add) with a relative earlier that morning on his way to work. This raises another question. Where is the son? If you were told that your home just burned down, wouldn’t you come home?

Hours go by and I am not allowed in the unit because I could disturb “evidence”.  Evidence? What?

The tenants insist that there must have been an electrical problem in the unit. The Fire Inspector asks the tenant if she knows what her son had in his closet. She doesn’t know anything. According to her, she never goes into his room.

There is no proof of anything because everything was burned beyond recognition.  The likely cause was faulty wiring on the “growing system” in one of the closets.  Someone was growing some kind of plants in the closet. When I ask the tenant, she thinks maybe her son was growing sunflowers.

I guess our gardener friend got growing tips from the various “how-to grow marijuana” books that were also found in his room. Those must have been some pretty cool sunflowers.

🔑 Make sure you have a “Loss of Rental Income” rider on your homeowner’s insurance policy. The homeowner was able to collect the rent each month although the unit was uninhabitable.