My Asshole Housemate (Or - How to Break Pyrex) [lame and misleading title]

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m really pissed off at my housemate this week.

This Thursday I spent the day working at the local office for the National Alliance of the Mentally Ill, setting up their new computers and transferring files between computers, getting everything set so that the office will be able to run with the new machines they just got. Not too hard, but it’s in the top floor of an old church building - so calling the office stuffy and poorly ventilated is a kindly euphemism. (Heaven help those who work there regularly.) Anyways, after I get that done I want nothing more than to go home, drink some ice cold water and crunch, at a rough estimate, about a gallon of ice on top of that.

So, I come home to find that my asshat of a housemate left the sink full of dishes, NO water in the Brita 2 gallon filtration unit in the fridge, and used up all the ice, too. Grumbling mightily, I clean up the pile of dishes sitting in the sink, put away the clean dishes that had been sitting in the drying rack, and fill the water filter, then once the water has filtered, I fill up the ice, too.

I’m not too happy with the asshat, as you can imagine.

Anyways, tonight I just got back from doing my weekly shopping, and decided that I’d treat myself to one of the most addicting bits of junk food known to man: Totino’s Pizza Rolls. So, I unload my week’s groceries, turn on the oven to preheat it, and then get comfortable, to wait for when I can put the Pizza Rolls into the oven and mange.

Instead, when the oven reached about 350 F I hear this loud CRACK followed by some lame hissing, and some steam starting to leak out of the oven door. I open up the oven door and find that my asshole housemate left one of my small Pyrex mixing bowls on the floor of the oven. Apparantly it was put in there to hold water for when he’d cooked some sourdough bread earlier this week. (That’s supposed to make the crust nice and chewey.) And once the bread was done, he left it in there, because it was too hot really to take out. Then he forgot about it. So, this time, when heating it almost touching the heating element of the stove, and without the bowlful of water that had been there to cool the glass, and keep it from uneven heating and thermal expansion, the damned thing just burst like a kicked Jack’O’Lantern. And guess who’s going to have to clean up the mess in the oven?

Yup. Me.

Damn asshat.

I wish I could tell him to move out.

Alas, I don’t want to have pack up all my stuff for the second time this year.

(For anyone who’s not gotten it, yet - I live alone :smiley: )

2

My brother managed to destroy two Pyrex pans on his own. You see, they came with handles, and they were shallow, so they bore a passing resemblance to skillets. So he tried cooking with them on the stove.

Later, he asked me why our mutual friend who’d given him the Pyrex as an apartment warming gift wanted him dead. Seems the poor things had practically exploded on him. It took a while for me to piece together exactly what he’d done, and then we had a short chat about how “oven safe” and “microwave safe” does not equal “safe for stovetop cooking”.

3

D’oh! And here I was gonna point out how it was kinda your fault for not checking the oven before turning it on anyway. :smack: You were just all-over-the-place-wrong, there. But thanks for the laugh :smiley:

4

Too funny. :slight_smile:

5

It’s Og’s punishment on you for consorting with the Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Unless, of course, you’d care to install some remote control back door software on their workstations for me or something, heh heh…

6

Umm… I have to ask, just what would you do with such access? :eek: I mean, it’s only the local office, not the national one. They do some lobbying, some advocacy, but mostly just pointing people at organizations that can help them or their family members. They don’t even have that big a budget.

Besides, the people working there, for the most part, are so computer illiterate, even making their computers whistle ‘Dixie’ will just cause a reboot, not a ‘How the Hell did they make a computer without speakers do that?’ reaction. :smiley:

7

I’ve been caught out twice for not pre checking an oven before baking! :smack:

First time, I was home visiting from uni and decided to bake bikkies – preheated the oven all nice and cosy, gong went off that it were at the correct temp, cookies all globbed on trays ready to go in, and opened the oven door to discover that my dad had been using the oven to store all of the saucepans, lids, and frying pans. Was absolutely livid, both at myself (although honestly, I never expected to find all that stuff there!) and at him – it was all far too hot simply to take it from the oven and leave it lying about to cool off.

Second time, I was stopping with a friend as I needed about a week to work in a library near where she was living, and told her I would bake a pizza for her whilst she was at work for a treat when she got back home, since she didn’t know how to cook and was tired of just microwave things and ramen. Not only did she not know how to cook, she never used the cooker or its oven.

Turns out she stored textbooks in the oven :eek:

8

My dad often puts pans in the oven. When I go home, I never preheat the oven without taking a look inside to see what might be there. He’s been known to put frying pans with leftover oil in them inside the oven to cool off before he throws the oil out.

9

My roomie and I started a fire once by pre-heating without checking first. Apparently one of our other roomies, in her drunken stupor, had put an entire bag of cheetos in the oven and left it there. Not knowing what to do, we called public safety to come put out the fire. They got a nice laugh out of that one.

10

When I was a kid, Mom almost never kept processed sugary things in the house, hippie that she is. But one Thanksgiving, she bought marshmallows for sweet potato casserole and decided to hide them in the oven so we wouldn’t find and eat them.

Guess who forgot to take them out of the oven before preheating it to roast the turkey. :stuck_out_tongue: Caramelized sugar and burnt plastic - yum!

11

**Ms Boods ** or Eva Luna. I just can’t decide which one has the upper hand so far. Unless the textbooks started on fire, then I think we’ll have a clear winner. :smiley:

12

duffer, I agree. Boy, I feel better, now. So does my Asshole Housemate. :smiley:

13

How in the heck do you think I realised there were books in there?

I had to pre heat to about 450 F…

Eva Luna’s mum ended up with a candy-coated cooker, though!

:slight_smile:
If we are neck and neck, though, may I please just add the bit about what is now known in my household as the ‘turpentine incident?’

14

Three questions: first, were the text books ruined? And if so, did your friend manage to get insurance help to replace 'em?

And what is the ‘turpentine incident?’ Please! :slight_smile:

15

Wait a minute…

Are you saying that you can’t use the Pyrex skillets as a skillet? WTF! I’ve been using mine for years – am I just lucky? How can they make something that looks identical to a skillet, yet can’t be used on the stovetop? That’s just idiotic! It’s like making a thin wood stick with an eraser bonded to one end with a metal ferrule, painting it yellow with a ‘#2’ marking, and NOT putting in a graphite core.

Or making ‘hot pads’ out of spun aluminum, for maximum heat transfer.

16

Nope the books were fine; came through singed, but nothing serious. Mostly a bit of smoke and some curled pages. But I am a mediaevalist and she’s into Tudor history, so we’re used to working with sources what have some battle scars.

I suspect the turpentine incident will actually be a bit of a bore, and not at all as when I once drove my car into a bank (savings and loan, not a verge).

Err…I let a house for a few years when I was in grad school in Charlottesville, and there were a few tiny wee flaws in the house due to the not so scrupulous upkeep by the landlady. For example, the over part of the cooker never worked the entire three years I lived there. Oh, the mains was active, but I could never get the pilot lit. One day they were laying new gasmains in the street along the house, and I went out to bring the workers water, ice, nibblies, and since I lived on the corner and had two large oak trees in the front garden, told them they were welcome to park their vans there, and also please take their lunches in the garden cos the other neighbours always complained about the trucks, workers, noise, etc.

Anyway, I asked the foreman one day if he would come in and sort out the oven, cos three years without an oven and no microwave and only stove top cooking is a bore. He went in the house whilst I stayed outside speaking to his assistant, and about 35 seconds later the foreman shot back out of the house, quite pale, and asked me for my landlady’s phone number. My numerous complaints to her over the years about the cooker were met with, ‘Can’t you just eat out?’

The foreman of the gas company’s call about how the gas line was wide open in the oven but so old and bollixed that it would never light the pilot got a new cooker in the house.

But that’s not the turpentine incident. But bear in mind, I lived in a house that had a gas leak.

Fortunately, the house was so draughty and ill conceived, that it never blew up; the cooker was next to a back door what had a 1 inch gap on the bottom I kept stuffed with rags and things in winter.

The house was also terribly cold as it had a pre-War furnace in the attic (actually not unusual, the loft bit, in this neighbourhood) but there was no insulation. So you know, when we’d have six inches of snow, I had the only house in the neighbourhood with a completely dry, bare roof cos the heat went straight out the top. Oh well, the squirrels were happy. Oh – when the furnace finally conked out, during one of the colder C’ville winters, it was over a week before I could get her to ring someone to replace it (I wasn’t allowed to as she had to authorise everything, and she asked couldn’t I just get a space heater or stop with friends). The man who tried to repair it was in his 40s, and it was so old he had to ring up another man who had been retired for some years to figure out how to dismantle it to replace it. They never did manage to get it to pieces, and left it shoved to one side of the new one. But what really got them was that the main piping what went from the furnace to the main ductwork, before it branched out, was in pieces, not actually stuck together, but lying next to each other, so most of the hot air wasn’t even going into the ducts.

Right then. A dodgy stove, a cold house, and a furnace that doesn’t really work.

I work with textiles, and that winter discovered the fun of transferring photographs to silk fabric. One way to do it, is to make a photocopy of a photo, and place it face down on the silk, and rub the paper with cotton wool what’s been generously soaked in turpentine. It really is a lovely effect.

Turpentine fumes make me quite ill, so I decided the best place to do this, since I couldn’t go outside on a dark winter’s night, was to sit on the floor next to the draughty door which was by the gas leaking cooker.

I suppose you will be disappointed to know that my partner arrived home before anything interesting happened.

He’s always said he’s rather worried he’ll come home one day to a crater. I have not set the house on fire, but I did fuse a loaf of bread to the top of the cooker the other day. And I did create a fireball in the back garden disposing of some Lental palm for mum once.

17

PS Not me, but mum – she didn’t do this by accident; it was a freak thing. She had boiling water poured from a saucepan on the stove into a 2 cup Pyrex measuring cup, and as she was moving from the stove to the sink, the Pyrex thingie just shattered to pieces, and she had 2 degree burns on her foot, poor old thing. Bit of an unusual event. The pyrex wasn’t cold; it was at room temp from the cupboard.

18

What is it with yuo Dopers and Pyrex? :confused:

I’ve had the same dishes for 15 years with no problems. DON"T hurt the Pyrex! :mad:

19

awww, pshaw. Twarn’t nothing. A bad Pyrex break involves acids or bases. Heated acids or bases. <nodnodnodnodnodnodnodnod>

As in you lift the 150 mL beaker off the heater/magnetic stirrer, and leave the bottom of the beaker on the heater/stirrer. And the boiling acid pours all over the lab table. :eek: (Only a pH of about 5, so not a very grave risk, but still it WAS HCl.)

20

A great Pit OP! :smiley: […tip o’ the hat…]