This weekend, my employer moved to a new location. This evening I was setting up my computer in my new cube, and started smelling smoke.
Flashback to about five years ago: I was working for a different startup company, and very late one evening I smelled smoke and discovered that there was a fire in the next room. It was a very large room, and filled with dense smoke, but the fire alarm had not yet tripped. I called 911, did a quick runthrough of the building yelling “fire” in case anyone else was still there, found a fire extinguisher (with some difficulty), found the fire and sprayed it a big, then exited the building before having trouble with smoke inhalation. Turned out that a 500W metal halide ceiling lamp had exploded, and the plastic diffuser under it caught fire then dropped on the cubicle below.
Some time later, at the same company, I was at work late in the evening, and again smelled smoke. Someone else was there that evening, and we tracked the smell down to a lab, but couldn’t identify the source. By the time the fire department arrived, the smell was gone. Later it was determined that the bearings in an air conditioning unit had seized.
Back to the present…
When I noticed the smell, several other people were around and also noticed it. I grabbed a fire extinguisher, and we walked around to find the source. It turned out to be a “wall-wart” in a cube across from me. The resident of that cube unplugged it. The wall-wart was hot, though not outrageously so, but it definitely smelled of smoke. Fortunately the fire extinguisher proved unnecessary.
We’re not sure whether it was the wrong wall-wart for the equipment it was connected to, but even so that should not have caused it to smoke. Wall-warts are supposed to have internal thermal fuses that should blow before they heat up enough to start smoking. Perhaps this wall-wart was defective.
Ever since that first experience with fire at work, smelling smoke really causes me a lot of anxiety, though not enough to keep me from reacting sensibly. I’m just glad that it turned out to be only a minor problem, and that it happened while people were in the building to take care of it.