A fire and a coupon

[smileyeagle1021]

Taking a piping hot, gravy is bubbling chicken pot pie out of a 450 degree oven using one hand. Pan starts to tilt, yummy pot pie starts to slide and I grab it with my free hand. The one with no oven mitt on it.

Saved the pie but I am not sure it was worth the second degree burns on my hand. Strike that, I AM sure it was NOT worth the 2nd deg burns.

Mine is worse... 10 adolescent boys, fire, and gasoline are never a good combination... and when one of them says, "hey, I have a good idea" it's most definitely not.
Yeah, we turned off the propane lanterns so we could see the whoosh from them pouring a gallon of gasoline on the fire better.... yeah, the fire flamed up and promptly went out leaving us all blind, and I had the luck of stumbling and grabbing onto the still extremely hot lantern.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Taking a piping hot, gravy is bubbling chicken pot pie out of a 450 degree oven using one hand. Pan starts to tilt, yummy pot pie starts to slide and I grab it with my free hand. The one with no oven mitt on it.

Saved the pie but I am not sure it was worth the second degree burns on my hand. Strike that, I AM sure it was NOT worth the 2nd deg burns.

I dumped piping hot chili on my legs one time. I was wearing shorts.

Thanks to that, and my stupid ass scratching bug bites too vigorously, I have quite the variety of scars on my legs.

[EricKei]

I enhanced my fear/healthy respect for fire/hot stuff doing something similarly...unwise...

Ya see, I discovered as an early teen than you can cool off a hot frying pan by dropping it in the sink and turning the cold water on for a few seconds...One day, I tried this with a pan containing a couple inches of hot OIL.

I still have the "shadows" of the resulting burns on my right hand, nearly thirty years later >_> I swear it deprived me of a small birthmark that had previously been on the back of my hand, too.

Never did that again. I'd say "That goes without saying," but consider what board we're on.

[XCashier]

At this point my team scattered because they knew I was about to go postal on this lady...

Don't leave us hanging! We want to read what you said to this idiot. How many new ones did you rip her?

Librarian of Basra

What a wonderful article. Brave, smart lady. Thank you for posting that!

[lineswine]

*sigh* I know about burns, too.
I'd called at my wifes' school to fix something or other, this required use of my soldering iron.
OK, so I'd rigged the iron with the socket of an IEC connector - think "Back of a PC" - as mostly that was what I was working on in my job.
Anyway the plug end of the connector - the one with the 240 volt mains power on it - was quite short. I'd not realised HOW short, until I'd pulled it & my hand promptly slid off the handle of the iron & onto the element. 800 degrees F of iron stuck merrily to my hand.
I didn't swear - this was a staff room, after all, but I was pretty miffed at the time.
The burn lasted a good 2 months before I was back to what passes for "normal"...luckily with no scar, but a lasting memory.

[Zapper]

Coupon for a free meal, huh? Sure, but you can only get a hot meal right now...

[mathnerd]

I enhanced my fear/healthy respect for fire/hot stuff doing something similarly...unwise...

Ya see, I discovered as an early teen than you can cool off a hot frying pan by dropping it in the sink and turning the cold water on for a few seconds...One day, I tried this with a pan containing a couple inches of hot OIL.

I still have the "shadows" of the resulting burns on my right hand, nearly thirty years later >_> I swear it deprived me of a small birthmark that had previously been on the back of my hand, too.

Never did that again. I'd say "That goes without saying," but consider what board we're on.

Along the lines of hot oil and water...

Way to hot oil and far to wet potatoes don't mix well. I think I have the picture uploaded correctly. If I managed to get it right, this was taken about 6 weeks after the incident and before the skin grafts. Right after it happened, you could clearly see small sections of finger bone.

[wolfie]

Which is why, when I'm picking up or delivering a load of scrap metal at a place that deals in scrap soda cans, I always ASK if I can dispose of the empties in my truck. Some places are "sure!" (a.k.a. they get some free aluminum of a known grade), but one place (where I was delivering bales of crushed soda cans) was "containers of liquid, even empties, are not allowed on the premises". A visit from the "tinsel fairy" is no fun at all.

[JarethsPet]

We took down our gaspumps one time for service. Had cones, signs..the works.

Yet still people came in demanding to get gas out of non-functioning pumps. I told my boss maybe we should rope off the entrance and he just pointed out that they'd run that over.

[Geek King]

I told my boss maybe we should rope off the entrance and he just pointed out that they'd run that over.

Chains. Then they get the instant-lesson of damaging their car. I'm all about the learning, after all.

[XCashier]

Chains. Then they get the instant-lesson of damaging their car. I'm all about the learning, after all.

They wouldn't learn the lesson at all; they'd just sue you for damaging their precious car.

Far too many people are perfectly content to go through their whole lives without learning anything.

[Chromatix]

My burn story is quite tame by comparison to some of you.

My parents favour AGA stoves - the ones that stay alight 24/7 and can be fitted to act as central heating boilers (though ours weren't). They've had one gas-fired, one kerosene-fired and one coal-fired example, in different houses of course. This incident involved the gas-fired one, although that's not actually relevant.

Anyway, I had been taught from a young age about this perpetually hot device with heavy lids in the kitchen - though it is merely warm to the touch on the outside - and knew that oven gloves were required to remove items from the ovens (which, for obvious reasons, lie within the outer insulation) or to move the racks. We had two pairs of gloves for this purpose, both connected by a long strip of fabric so that they stayed together. This strip was long enough to reach around the largest pot that would fit in the oven, and we were practiced at slipping the free hand into the second glove when needed. Indeed, there were usable glove pockets attached to both sides of the strap, so there would normally be two layers of insulating fabric between hand and pot, and one protecting the back of the hand.

The problem was that there was a hole in one of the gloves, and I was the one to discover it while handling one of the oven racks (which, as they are in the oven all the time, are hotter than the pots get). With the number of different ways that the gloves could be worn, it's possible the problem had existed for a while without being noticed. The result was a small but quite severe burn on one fingertip - it took a while to heal, but didn't leave any permanent mark.

[PepperElf]

We took down our gaspumps one time for service. Had cones, signs..the works.

last time i got gas, i was about to make a left hand turn to the pump and saw a cone in front of it. so I.... drove around the station to pull up to another pump. amazing how easy that worked, right?


and burns... most of mine are from my own stupidity.
- grabbed the pizza oven door at my first job, by the wrong part. blisters on a couple of fingers.

- no sunscreen for a few hours close to the equator. my sunburn was pretty severe - a blister or two in some areas. i had tan lines for over a year!

- a few weeks ago I'd only had the burner on for a few seconds when I turned it off to clean out the drip pan. i learned just how quickly that burner heats up. ouchy! small blisters but they quickly healed.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Ah, burns. The first burn I can think of was when I was a kid, around the 4th of July. All the kids in the neighborhood would run around with sparklers and 'write' in the air with the smoke and light, and when they burned out, we'd stick them in a coffee can. Now, this coffee can had... something in it to cool the sparkler sticks. It wasn't water, for some reason I wanna say it was wax, but whatever it was, it got hot because of all the hot metal in it.

Us kids were supposed to hand the dead sparklers to Mom and Dad to put in the coffee can. I didn't, and tipped the thing over. I tried to stop it falling, and whatever that liquid was spilled onto my hand. HOT. Mom rushed me inside to run cool water over my hand. Nothing serious. The whatever-it-was hardened under the cool water, and Mom just took it off my hand. Hand was sore, but no other damage.

I've burned myself taking things out of the oven with the wrong kind of covers, and most recently a bit of my arm touched the rim of the oven as I was taking something out. It was sore for a while, and I've still got a bit of a scar from it a couple months later, but that's it.

[bbbr]

The grocery store i used to work in had a natural gas leak one day, bad enough it was noticeable at the front-end. Alarms sounded, fire fighters in full gear told us to evacuate NOW and wouldn't you know it, the customers who hadn't evac'd were demanding to be rung out... Uh, no- I'm not gonna be caught in a natural gas explosion so you can get your stuff.

Burn wise- yup, got plenty. Including one from my laser welder when i reached through the beam. Probably the worst was when i decided to slide down a 2" diameter nylon rope sans gloves as a teenager. The ten foot drop resulted in burning off my finger prints and 3 weeks of pain, only bright side was that school was out and didn't have to do much while my fingers healed.