Break Glass in Case of Emergency

Donna and I nearly died a most un-glamorous death this Sunday - Death by Nachos. To be killed choking on a nacho may be far from glorious, but it pales in comparison to the blaze of lunacy that was nearly our fate. Burning our apartment building to the ground trying to make nachos would be an embarrassing tale to tell at the Pearly Gates.
Donna, who was making the nachos, would have you blame the oven itself. It being old and decrepit, it is unable to defend itself. I would say that human error may be at the root of the problem. Those who know us may ask what Donna was doing in the kitchen in the first place. Well, truth be told I was terribly hungover. Nachos, as you can imagine, sounded great.
Great until they caught on fire. Donna had gone in to check on them and then suddenly leapt out of the kitchen talking quickly about a fire. To my ears, she sounded calm. Of course, that's the hangover talking. If I were to guess, I'd say that at that point only every fifth word was getting through the cloud of lethargy that hung over my head.
Then Donna shouted. The essence of which was that we had a "real" fire in our kitchen. Her shout made me leap to my feet, an action for which I was ill prepared, and my head immediately started pounding.
In the kitchen, the nachos were indeed on fire. Opening the oven door caused two things: the flames to flare up and Donna to jump back. I grabbed the pizza shovel to take the tray out of the oven. Donna shouted, "Don't fan them."
While I didn't have a plan as to what to do with this little inferno, I must stress that fanning the flames had not occurred to me. I shut the door. "I'm not going to fan them." But what now. No thoughts of baking soda or salt or any other home remedy was fighting its way through my throbbing head and as time went on the flames just got bigger.
In her head, Donna wanted to run out of the building. Instead she said, "Is there a fire extinguisher?"
"Yes, in the hall."
Out we went together, although Donna did pause to express concern that I had no pants on. Somehow standing in the hallway in my underwear was, at least for a brief moment, worse than the fire in our kitchen.
There it was just outside our door. Encased in glass. Break Glass in Case of Emergency.
Donna thought, 'Is this a big enough emergency?'
I thought, 'Surely we can get that out of there without breaking the glass.'
And so we stood there for an instant before we realized that if we did indeed want to break the glass, we had nothing to break it with. While Donna went to get a hammer, I'll confess I tried to open the box without breaking the glass. Thankfully, Donna returned to smash it.
The glass is Plexiglas and I remember noticing that it broke so cleanly and easily and I thought how clever the designer was.
Into the kitchen we went. I pulled the pin and Donna opened the door. The flames burst to life and I blasted them with the fire extinguisher.
"It's not out," Donna shouted.
Again, with the extinguisher. I scuttled out of the kitchen, starting stooped and sinking further as I went. There was smoke and dust everywhere. I had tried to stay as low as I could, but I had still inhaled a lot of crap and I stopped for the first time to wonder what that crap was. I had expected white cold jet of gas and instead I got a sandbox full of greenish yellow powder. Our normally white kitchen was absolutely coated. In fact, the entire apartment has needed cleaning to get rid of it.
Donna called the fire department, but not until the fire was out. I think she just wanted to see firemen. And they came, even though she had said the fire was out. I suppose she didn't sound trustworthy. They didn't say much, except that we should get a CO2 extinguisher because they don't make such a mess.
In the end, I never did get nachos.