The searing heat was fading and the Baghdad bureau’s workday was drawing to an end.

The office manager and a few drivers were downstairs splashing in the clear-blue hotel pool. Our security adviser was upstairs sweating through his daily workout. Those of us still in the third-floor newsroom were discussing national anthems, and how many of us were made to stand at school assemblies as children and sing patriotic songs for the “Arab homeland.”

“We were living in Yemen and I used to think the songs were Iraqi,” Faten was saying. She’s the 22-year-old daughter of one of our Iraqi correspondents. “There was a Palestinian man and I thought he was…”

BOOM.

The sliding glass door to the balcony wobbled in its metal frame; some windows on the lower floors of the hotel shattered. The shockwave swept through the office, stirring up the air and unsettling our stomachs. This bombing was close. Just before we trudged into the hallway in case of a second explosion, my colleague Mohammed checked his watch and hastily scribbled something in his notebook: 6:35.

In the corridor, we vied for space to peer out the hallway window, which overlooks the ground-floor swimming pool. Anxiety melted into relief; our guys looked fine. They were scrambling out of the pool, grabbing their towels and heading upstairs.

“They’re all OK. No shrapnel or anything,” said Sahar, an Iraqi reporter.

A thick, gray-black cloud of smoke billowed up from what looked like a few streets away. Neighbors in nearby apartment buildings were congregating on their balconies and rooftops, trying to determine the target.

Our British security adviser, still dripping from his workout, came down and said he thought the boom was a car bomb, perhaps a kilometer or more from the hotel. Our office manager said he thought it was at a nearby suspension bridge that leads into the Green Zone. The son of one of our drivers had heard it was outside a popular ice-cream shop. Downstairs, the cafeteria workers were certain it was on a street that leads to a prominent Shiite politician’s home.

Then an Iraqi colleague called the office to say the explosion was near her home, which is just blocks from our hotel. She was fine; no further information. (We later learned it was a parked car bomb that killed 21 people, burned nine cars and set a building on fire.)

No matter how many times you hear the booms, nothing prepares you for the suddenness with which the most mundane activities can be violently interrupted. The bombings cut down ordinary people doing ordinary things – swimming, chatting, working out, eating ice cream, shopping, sleeping.

I didn’t go back to the office after the bombing tonight. I took my laptop downstairs, ordered the strongest coffee the cafeteria makes and thought about how we used to cover every single explosion in Baghdad. On slow days in the summer of 2003, we’d even cruise around with a photographer, tracking down the source of any plume of smoke that rose across the capital’s minaret-studded skyline.

On many occasions, the smoke ended up coming from burning garbage. No story, no photos for us. No corpses, no widows for Iraqis.

Those were the days.