The Time Husband’s Junk Became Lethal
Does your guy LOVE to store tool-related things that he never uses? Mine sure does. Especially cords. All kinds of cords. Phone cords (including the curly ones that no one can use anymore because they don’t have phones with cords), orange cords, black cords, cords with colored knobs at the end, cords with heavy black boxes at the end. He should open his own cord store. Well, one day, we learned a lot more about cords than we ever wanted to!
Valuable Safety Tip #1: Don’t ever use old cords, especially thin cords. They can catch on FIRE. I know this because once I was sleeping and my husband woke me up at 3am asking, “Do you smell smoke? I smell smoke. Where is it coming from?” It took me several minutes to understand what he was asking–I mean, how often do you wake up to someone asking you if you smell smoke? So, we went together into his studio where he worked (and used “the cord” with his computer). Oh, we smelled smoke alright. But we couldn’t see it. Everything looked fine.
That brings us to Valuable Safety Tip #2: Beware when you smell smoke in a room and the electricity suddenly shuts off. Why? Because this may mean that an outlet is catching on FIRE. So, we were standing there going, “hm, smell smoke, but all’s fine.” Then the lights shut off, and since it was night, the room was TOTALLY dark. This is the only reason we were able to see the source of the fire–because thank heaven, when outlets catch on fire, apparently the fires are usually small at first–like 4 inches high, but look out, they double in size every 2-3 seconds!!!!
I’m so sorry to say that the next moments are a blur, but I seem to recall both of us running around the room in circles and not doing anything useful for about one or two minutes as the fire grew larger (in all, it got about 3 feet tall in all). Then I THINK my husband somehow put out the fire using a blanket. He put it out very quickly, so almost no harm done. I am very grateful for that. (Had either of us known this of course, we’d have been checking cord in our house like crazy. By the way, by “house,” I mean “apartment.”) SO, in the end, all was okay. And you might want to check your cords.
(Sidenote: If you’ve had a small fire in your apartment, note that the magic Arm & Hammer Eraser things will not clean it. I know, they clean everything, but they will not clean black smoke residue off of walls, even if it’s only a little.)