We have an old kitchen. It badly needs a total makeover but I don’t have the money at present.
As part of a cheap facelift I was putting in some new vinyl flooring. In the corner of the kitchen is a cupboard under the worktop. The floor obviously extends into the cupboard, so I figured I’d do a proper job and extend the floor tiles through into the cupboard. Fine. It was a bit awkward hunching myself right into the cupboard to do the tiles at the back, but all went well.
Thing is, would the tile right in the furthest back corner stick properly? It would not. One corner kept popping up. So, I reached for the superglue. Not an approved tile adhesive, I’ll grant you, but I figured it’s right at the back of a cupboard and it’d do the job.
You can see where this is going, can’t you? The superglue did a great job of sticking the tile to the floor. It did an even better job of sticking my hand to the tile. You know how quickly superglue grabs your skin? I just had time to think “Woah, that’s a bit stic…” and I was permanently bonded to the floor. At the back of a 2ft 6in high cupboard under a kitchen worktop.
Fortunately, I was able to yell a few choice words to Mrs C to the effect that if it wasn’t too much trouble could she possibly come downstairs and get some hot water and a blunt knife, and I managed to extricate myself in about 15 minutes without too much skin loss.
If I lived alone… well, you can imagine the headlines when they found my body.
I can’t help but wonder how many wives in America would love to have the opportunity to take some hot water and a blunt knife to their husband while his hand was glued to the floor and his head was stuck in a sound-muffling cabinet…
The good news is, it really must be love. I mean, you’re alive & still posting, right?
You know, I don’t believe that my husband would call me for help. Not unless he really and truly couldn’t get himself unstuck. Sure, I’d bring him a blunt knife and hot water, but I would also make Comments. Very sharp comments.
On the other hand, I do scratch his back several times a day.
I guess if I had been on my own I would have had to find out which was more firmly stuck, my hand to the tile or the tile to the floor. Or wait and see how long it takes for surface skin to slough off.
Either way I’m guessing it would have been painful.
I’ve recently moved into a flat on my own. The first day, I used the toilet in the utility room. The property agents did not warn me that the door lock was broken. When I finished, I couldn’t get out. My phone was in my jacket in the living room. I was in there for 20 minutes, initial annoyance turning to a creeping cold sweat. Of course, I could probably have kicked the door of its hinges, but I wanted to avoid the (inevitably overpriced) repair bill. A judicious amount of rattling the locking mechanism eventually reduced the latch’s resistance to about 2mm, at which point I was able to force it. There’s a wedge under that door, now.
