Hot Pocket Mishap

At the end of 7th grade, my previous school, Countryside, offered its students the opportunity to take a school trip to Puerto Rico. I remember the excitement I felt when the trip was announced. Traveling to a foreign (ish) place, with no parents, and friends. It was something I hadn't really ever done before. After talking with my friends about it, and confirming that other people wanted to go as well, I talked it over with my parents, and after a fair amount of convincing was given the green light for the trip. The trip would be the weekend following the last day of that school year, and upon the arrival of the said weekend, the excitement about the trip was at an all-time high. Between applying for the trip and the trip itself, I had found out I would be going to Uni the next year, and that meant this would be some of the last time I would get to spend with my Countryside friends.

Upon our Saturday departure date, we encountered our first roadblock, a delayed flight. My family thus had to adjust our timetable, as instead of driving up to Chicago for me to fly out with the school, I now had to sleep the night in the city and leave the following day. After the rush that was finding a decent hotel around us and my parents adjusting their weekend plans to stay in the city, we settled in for the night.

Early the following morning, my parents dropped me off at the airport, and after everybody told their families their goodbyes, the joy of the trip began. We caught our flight, actually landed in Puerto Rico ahead of our scheduled arrival, and got on a bus to the hotel that we would be staying at. The hotel was pretty nice, to be honest. They offered breakfast in the morning which would prove useful with the early morning starts we would have in the week that followed. After we settled in the rooms, we were told we had the rest of the day to ourselves just to chill and hang out in the hotel, and the planned activities would begin the next day. 

A lot of the guys ended up going to the same room, as our trip happened to overlap with the 2017 NBA finals. Since there was some time before the game started, some of us decided to head to a convenience store out of hunger, which happened to be right next to our hotel. One of my friends, Holden, decided to come back with Hot Pockets, and as he came back he put them in the fridge and put the game on.

Unfortunately, the Cavs got obliterated 4-1 that NBA finals, but I think the one game that we watched happened to be the one game they won. After the game ended, Holden decided he wanted to make his Hot Pockets. He took the box out, read the direction on how long to put them in the microwave, and popped them in there. Unfortunately, Holden had decided to refrigerate the Hot Pockets and not put them in the freezer as he was supposed to. Before the 3-minute timer on the microwave was up, the fire alarm started going off, and in the midst of our finals discussions, we didn’t realize that it was our fault for a minute or two. What also took us a little bit to realize, was that the alarm wasn’t just going off in our room, it was going off in the entire hotel building. Fast-forwarding about 20 minutes, the entire hotel was evacuated to the parking lot, including all the guests that we didn’t know that had decided to spend their summer in Puerto Rico as well, all because of some Hot Pockets. And this was only night one.