My head was a little foggy when I returned from lunch Tuesday afternoon. Well acquainted as I am with this particular brand of allergy-induced haze, I popped a couple of Tylenol then settled in at my desk to wait for the pills to work their magic on my mounting headache. So, when the earth started doing that whole swaying thing, I initially wrote it off as yet another symptom of my allergy woes.

Until that is, I heard a chorus of voices from around the newsroom, asking: “Did you feel that?” “What the heck was that?” and, my personal favorite, “Holy *&#^!”

The ground, and indeed the building around us, was still doing its little shimmy as one of my coworkers ran through a laundry list of possible natural and man-made disasters that could be at the root of the issue. None of them seismic in nature, I might add.

“It’s an earthquake,” I said, all nonchalant like, as I calmly plonking myself in my desk chair.

Yes, that’s right. There I was, the earth moving beneath my feet a la Carole King. And I was completely calm.

Which, in and of itself, was even more startling than the fact that we were in the middle of an earthquake. And, believe me, no one was more surprised than me.

See, I’ve always had a deep-seated fear of natural disasters. Particularly earthquakes.

In fact, this aversion to the very thought of the havoc wreaked by the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates was enough to deter me from moving to sunny Southern California. Which I did actually contemplate for a period of 28 seconds a few months after I graduated from college.

Yet, here I was, completely unfazed by the (surprisingly rhythmic) movement all around me.