Today something happened that I never thought I’d experience in Washington, DC: an earthquake. I was in my office with a patient when we heard a rumbling above us. Thunder? But then the room started to vibrate, lights flickered, and a large mirror crashed off the ledge. We hightailed it out of there down seven flights of stairs.

Never having lived on the West Coast, where, I’m told, an event of this magnitude (5.8 on the Richter Scale) barely gets noticed, I felt pretty shaky. I didn’t know what precautions to take. Was it safe to go back into the building? What about aftershocks? Nobody else on the street seemed to have a clue about what to do, either. Worse yet, there was no cell phone service, and no authorities to instruct us on proper earthquake protocol.

It turned out to be an interesting opportunity to observe how people put their personal spin on an ambiguous occurrence. I overheard several bystanders speculating that there had been a terrorist attack. Not an implausible explanation given that my office is only eight blocks from the White House, but not the first one to pop into my mind.

Twenty miles away in his home office, my husband saw the walls shake and jumped to his own conclusions. He immediately assumed that the incompetent contractors who had renovated our house were even worse than we’d thought, and our addition was collapsing. What a relief when he found out it was only an earthquake.