Strange Day Number 2!

I am NOT kidding you. I walk in to work today, from the outside which was quite cold, and their was a weird stentch in the air. I had walked in with a co-worker and they said something about the smell too. It like, hit you in the face, well nose really. It smelled like something was burning. As we walk closer to the school area and enter through one set of locked doors the smell got even worse. I said to him, "wow, something is really burning." It was a heavy burning smell. Not a fresh fresh burn. (yes two freshes). It wasn't quite a burned out fire burn smell. But somewhere in between.

I said, "maybe they burned the breakfast this morning."
The other teacher said, "no it smells like charcoal."
I asked, "like a charcoal grill?".
He said, "no like making charcoal."

We then, walked through the next set of locked doors and the smell was worse and now it was starting to burn my eyes and give me a bit of a headache. There were a couple other teachers standing there and someone mentioned that they could see a haze in the air. Yup, I could see it too. So we stand there a minute longer and wonder if it is because the lights are back on or because the heat was back on. Then a guard walked in (which is our first indication that the kids are coming down soon) and we asked them what was on fire. Oh, by the way, they don't always evacuate the building if there is a fire for security reasons. I know don't ask. Yes, if you read yesterday's entry you would know how secure the building is and that this is odd. But there was real possibility that there could be something on fire in a different part of the building and we would be business as usual and may not know. But he says that it was worse in the school area but they could smell it on the units also. We asked what it was and he said it was the forest fires that were burning a county away and it was being pulled in by the ventilation/heating system. And the maintenance people knew about it and weren't doing anything about it nor were they switching it to recirculate instead of sucking in fresh (or in this case smoke filled air).

The weirdest part was that I had just come in from the outside and when I was out there I didn't smell anything, but it was all over the inside of the building. Just another weird day in jail.