Today I want to tell the story about how we caught the microwave on fire last week. "You what?" Yes, you heard me, we actually caught the microwave on fire and my amazing roomies were as calm and collected as possible during the whole ordeal.
Here's how it went down:
When we first moved into our apartment we had to purchase a microwave, so I did the sensible thing and went to the local thrift store and bought a really nice one for $7.00. Anyway we have used this said microwave really well over the last 18 months. It cooked up our food well, went through 3 roommates for Lindsay and I (on a side note and another blog post we have a running theory that people are getting married just to get away from us, but that's for a different time). Oh microwave you performed your task so well.
Anyway, these last couple weeks have been very cold so we have been running our fireplace a lot and Lindsay in the spirit of making Christmas gifts has also added some smoky elements to our apartment, so when I was sitting on my bed asking what was burning it was an interesting moment for several reasons:
1. My bed is as far away from the microwave in the house it can possibly be and I was the first to smell the burning plastic and cloth.
2. There was no fire going that night and Lindsay was reading in her room.
3. My other roommate who I will affectionately call R for the sake of clarity, was in the bathroom so what could possibly be burning in there other than a curling iron and she was getting ready for bed, so it seemed improbable.
4. The smoke alarm was blinking happily away, but did not warn us of the impending doom to our poor microwave.
What had happened was R had, like she does every morning and evening, put her rice heating pad in the microwave to warm it up, to warm up herself and relax as she crawled into bed. And for some reason this night it decided to catch on fire. We are still uncertain as to the how, but we know the result, by the time I had asked what's burning, and Lindsay, R and I had made it into the kitchen filled with smoke the rice warmer was literally on fire(and I don't use the word literally lightly folks). R calmly removed it and dumped it into the sink to run water on it, while I realizing the microwave was melted and was still smoldering wiggled my hand behind it to unplug it before we had an electrical fire on our hands. Meanwhile Lindsay was opening all the windows we could in order to air out the apartment before the happily blinking smoke detector figured out what was happening and caught up. The whole thing lasted no more than about 2 minutes from beginning to end, but the still smoldering microwave went out the open door to the 25 degree concrete porch meanwhile the airing out and clean up ensued.
Happy end to the story is the grand total of our losses were about $10 and now we have a funny roommate bonding moment to tell the world. On the other hand we now are microwaveless which is rather inconvenient and so the hunt for another working microwave begins.
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