Beach BBQ Vs Earthquake

What sounds more interesting – a beach barbeque party or an earthquake?
Ok, I know beach barbeque party of course! Right? Well if you’d ask me, I’d say an earthquake. I know what you are thinking now – she is crazy! Well judge for yourself …
It so happened that we had a beach barbeque party organized at the office – just a summer celebration lunch. There were some relay games and Hawaiian shirt contest and the likes. Lunch was hotdog, pasta salad and potato salad followed with ice cream! Interesting it was indeed as there was the whole of the office – all of 12 floors worth people gathered to enjoy the meal.
Then we headed back to our dungeon. This needs a bit of explanation. We are located on the 14th floor but some restructuring work is going on there and so we are temporarily located in the basement which we lovingly call the dungeon.
So, back to the story. We came back and were at work for about ½ hour. I felt something shaking. I thought I’m moving my chair too much so sat still and the shaking continued. Saw the water bottle shaking and looked around to see if anybody else had noticed. That time, the colleague who sits across me also looked up and said he too felt it. Then there was some noise around and we all started wondering if we should head outside. I hesitated for a moment thinking I should take my passport with me if nothing else! But that thought just flashed past and we headed out. Some more people were descending the stairs.
We are in a building 22 stories and if we felt the tremors in the basement, I’m sure people on the higher floors experienced them much more than us. After about 10 mins, we started to go back and the building security would not let us in. We told him we just wanted to grab our passports but he wouldn’t agree. So we had no option but to go the parking lot away from the building. Once there, some of us started checking on their blackberries about news of the earthquake. Here we came to know that the earthquake was 5.5 on the Richter scale. They had started evacuating the building and all the staff was out. We were told that there would be investigation to verify that the building suffered no structural damages before we would be let in. that would mean about 3 hours of no activity and just waiting. 3 of us sneaked inside through an alternate route and gathered our stuff.
Then somebody had a bright idea of going for beer! So our team headed out to this place and we had a great time there with drinks and snacks and chattering around. Making the most of ... earthquakes… on a Wednesday afternoon…
Not totally crazy, am I now?