When I got to the office this morning I noticed (like one could fail to notice) a hook & ladder fire truck in front of the hotel next door. I thought, wow, that would really suck, having to evacuate your hotel room at 7 a.m., particularly in the sleet...although there didn't seem to be any pajama-clad people milling around.
As it happens, my office is on the fifth floor of our building, with a nice view of the hotel parking lot. And over the next hour, more and more people showed up and did mill around the fire truck, though they weren't in pajamas and didn't seem to be coming from the hotel. And someone also set up a tent with a local radio station's logo and started passing out coffee.
Eventually it occurred to me (Monday morning; I was slow) that perhaps this was a radio stunt, so I Google'd the station. Sure enough:
Join WKRP this Valentine's Day (Monday, Feb 14th) from 6am-8am for Ben and Brian's Diamond Drop in the Hotel Parking Lot. We'll drop 987 marshmallows from two Fire Truck Towers...97 round cubic zirconias will be stuffed in the marshmallows, and one heart-shaped cubic zirconia will represent the grand prize-- $1,000 pair of Diamond Earrings!
Well, the second fire truck didn't show (maybe they needed it to respond to actual emergencies, since it was sleeting), but there were only thirty or forty people in the crowd anyway. I admit it...I took my coffee and swung my chair around and watched the show.
The firemen were pretty nice...they sort of gently dropped the marshmallows a few handsful at a time. The assembled...well, not masses...grabbed the marshmallows as they hit the ground, and they looked pretty polite about it. A few couples were obviously working in tandem, with one person scooping up marshmallows and another holding them in a hat or coat. One woman was out there (in the sleet) without a coat, just her perky red Valentine's Day suit and heels.
When all the marshmallows were dropped, the people knelt along the curb and started flattening their marshmallows. From five stories up I couldn't see detail, so I don't know if they were keeping the cubic zirconias, and I never saw anyone jumping around wildly like a big winner. I did see several people walk away with their hands full of marshmallow, then I saw them come back wiping their hands on paper towels. (Chickie in the red suit left her marshmallow pile on the curb, and it was still there when I left the office this afternoon.)
And as I said, there's no ending to the story. The people left, the fire truck left, and I turned around and worked the rest of the day, with Baby, if you ever wondered/Wondered whatever became of me/I'm livin' on the air in Cincinnati ... going through my head.
Posted by Nic at February 14, 2005 04:42 PM