Boiler Problems

This being our first home, we don't know what's normal or not. Our basement started to smell a bit like smoke but we just thought that that was normal for an oil burner. Two weeks later our smoke alarms started going off...this has never happened before. They are hardwired throughout the house, so I was running around with a kitchen towel trying to shut them off. That didn't work so we went into the basement, walked towards the boiler just as it let out a puff of black smoke and some fire shot out of the sides. Very scary! Turns out, when the maintenance man came to service the boiler he didn't reconnect a loose wire that was necessary to keep the boiler running. It has now been taken care of and we haven't had any problems since!