No smoke without fire

I think it's safe to says that yesterday wasn't the luckiest I've ever had. After sleeping through my alarm, my eyes flew open 30 minutes before I was due at work and after a mad rush I made it with about 12 seconds to spare before the start of my show.

Next, I was working on my article for this week, had spent about two hours on it and was on my last two sentences when the very old computer in the studio I was working in decided to freeze up.

I had my play list going at the same time and had no problem accessing that page but, try as I might, going back to my article proved to be impossible so I decided to go for a quick cigarette break while I waited for it to unfreeze.

A few minutes later I returned and the computer was still frozen, so I called for some computer whiz to help as I only had 15 minutes left before I needed to leave.

As computer man was hard at work doing everything he could to try to liberate my work from the cyber jaws of a very cranky computer, the fire alarm picked that moment to go off.

As is often the case when fire alarms go off, the last thing I ever expected to be the reason for its sudden call to action was an actual fire.

I wouldn't say it goes off on a regular basis, but it goes off often enough for no reason for most of us to ignore it and get irritated by the interruption.

Still, after a couple of minutes of complaining to computer guy that one day there'd be a real fire and we'd all ignore it and end up trapped in a horrible inferno (well OK I was probably not being that polite about it but you get my point), I decided to pop my head out the studio door and check there wasn't a cloud of smoke heading our way.

Finding a lot more commotion that I expected it suddenly occurred to me that maybe something was wrong and when the faint smell of smoke reached my nostrils, I realised the fire alarm was actually going off for a reason.

I wasn't particularly worried because despite a lot of running around like headless chickens in a bid to locate the source of the smoke, no one appeared to be in too much of a panic so I went back into the studio to discover that the computer was still holding my article hostage and it looked like my only option was to tearfully wave my words goodbye and pull the plug.

It wasn't until five minutes later that I was informed there was a strong possibility I might be responsible for the loud ringing and unpleasant smell of smoke permeating the corridors - OK, fine I'm not giving myself credit. The truth is that I was fully responsible for the entire episode. Ah yes! My day was going from bad to worse! I'd managed to oversleep, lose a good dollop of my work and set the place on fire with my cigarette end ... all before midday.

By now feeling more than a little sorry for myself, convinced I was jinxed and that entire world was out to get me, I made my way to the car wondering what else could possibly go wrong. I picked up the phone and called our illustrious deputy editor Liz to tell her my tale of woe and explain what had happened to my article for the week.

By the time I'd finished my sad tale all I could hear on the other end of the phone was roaring laughter that I have to admit, after my initial split second of surprise, turned out to be very addictive and by the end of the conversation everything seemed right with the world again. By bursting out laughing, Liz had reminded me of my article from last week, that nothing is ever as bad as it seems and that I needed to take my own advice to 'Live my smile'.

Far from being a bad day, everything was actually working out well. Yes I'd over slept but I made it to work on time. Yes I'd lost my work to an angry computer but I now had something new to write about and when I do get round to rewriting the article I'd lost, I'm pretty sure it will come out better than the original. And while almost burning my place of work to the ground could have turned into a very serious disaster indeed, it didn't and the only victim was a rather old bin that had already seen better days. So all in all when I really think about it I think it's safe to say yesterday was actually a very lucky day.