Let me start by saying I'm a catastrophe waiting to happen.
I'm accident prone and a horrible klutz — both traits I picked up from my parents. Thanks to my dad's myriad of accidents growing up — second degree burns, contusions, sliced off bits — I learned at a young age how to patch myself up. My mother and I both routinely come up with new, eccentric ways to hurt ourselves. Anyone can stub their toe — it takes a master to stab themselves with a fork through a bag they happen to trip over (I still have the scar on my toe).
When I moved into my first apartment in 2007, I was confident I could handle anything. I was 23, on my own, ready to take on the world. My dwelling was adorable — a little one bedroom on the third floor of an old Victorian house in Kingston, NY. Yes, the ceiling leaned in at dramatic angles, but I'm only 5'4", so this wasn't a huge issue. And yes, the apartment held a temperature of at least 75 degrees year-round. But it was mine.
—
My landlord was something else. He was a nice retired gentleman with a daughter just a bit older than myself, so I think he felt a fatherly inclination toward my well-being.
The water pressure in my apartment was truly awesome. Anything past mid force could knock a glass out of your hand. During my first week on my own, I went to wash up a dish in the kitchen sink and the handle spun loose and wouldn't go off. Water crashed out of the faucet like I'd just let loose the dam. I did what any sane single woman would do, I called my father.
When mom answered, she could hear the rush of something gone terribly wrong and merely replied "yup" when I said "Hi, I need to speak to dad."
Dad calmly walked me through how to find the shutoff and told me to call the landlord.
When Bob arrived, he took a look at the sink and said "Huh, would you look at that."
Turns out my porcelain sink was so old they didn't even make the replacement hardware for it anymore. Bob bought the last two handles the store had, and put the extra under the sink "just in case."
The stove was another matter entirely.
I had never worked with a gas stove before, and this one was, special. Like everything else in the apartment it was likely from the 1950s. It was solid, small and rather grimy under the hood. Re-lighting the pilot light was a regular necessity.
Early on in my association with the stove, a gas man came around to inspect all the apartments in the building. He looked over the connections and the top without much issue. Then he opened the oven and took a sharp intake of breath.
When the gas guy has that reaction, you don't use the oven. Ever.
It wasn't like there was a gas leak, or anything like that. Just the pilot light for the oven was broken and would require me reach well within the orifice to light it manually.
I decided I could live without it.
There was only ever one explosion in my kitchen, and it was safely restricted to a small enclosed area.
The previous tenant had had some strange ideas, not least of which was replacing burnt out 40 and 60 watt bulbs with 100 watt ones. The single bulb stuck in the middle of the vanity lights should have been enough of a warning to check the rest of the fixtures. But I had wanted to reduce my electric bill anyway, so I went around and replaced all the lights with energy saver bulbs. There was no way to prepare myself for what I found in the kitchen.
I heard an odd rattling sound when I went to remove the light cover. Once I got it down I discovered he had placed not one but two 100 watt bulbs in the fixture. This had resulted in the glass melting and separating from the metal bases of the bulbs. The glass enclosures were hanging, balanced precariously over their wire innards.
I grabbed a towel and carefully removed the glass from the fixture (I only dropped one of them, which I chose to look at in a glass-half-full kind of way).
I had to take a pair of needle nose pliers and carefully untwist the metal from the sockets. After I was certain all the offending materials were out of the way, I installed my two 13 watt (60 watt equivalent) bulbs and thought nothing more of it.
Weeks later, I turned on my kitchen light and had started to cross the room when there was a loud bang and sizzling sound right over my head. I dove across the room as the light went out.
After a few moments I got up, skirted around the offending fixture, and turned off the switch. My parents advised me not to check the light myself, as florescent bulbs contain hazardous material and there was a chance one of them had gone boom.
Great.
So I called Bob. He wandered into the kitchen, glanced up at the light and proceeded to calmly remove the cover with his bare hands. I winced. "Huh, would ya look at that" from the unflappable Bob.
Luckily, the argon and mercury were still safely encased in their proper tubing.
The explosion it turns out was caused by the previous wattage overload. The wires were completely fried, as were other parts of the fixture. Another necessary replacement.
—
I'm an only child, so naturally my mom worried about me. It didn't help matters that dramatic things tended to happen to me while I was on the phone with her.
Once, while retrieving something from the microwave, I made mistake of standing up too quickly and cracking my head on one of the low eves. This resulted in me sprawled out on the floor dazed with my mother shouting urgently in my ear "What was that? What happened? Are you OK??"
This is also how I received my third concussion.
The worst phone call home happened during my dinner break from work.
I was catching up with mom and decided the apartment needed to be vented. Technically, the windows were supposed to be kept shut and the air conditioner removed during the winter, but I think Bob understood that as my apartment was furnace, I was an exception to that rule.
So I attempted to raise the living room window by pressing up on the frame. It didn't budge.
I sighed and placed my hand upon the glass, as I had done in the past without incident, and pushed up.
There was a loud crack as my hand went through the glass and the window shattered into multiple pieces.
Apparently I screamed, though I don't remember.
All I remember was looking down dumbly at my hand as my mother shouted in my ear "What happened? Are you OK??"
"I put my hand through the window."
"Oh my God, are you bleeding??"
"Yep."
A small chunk was missing between my ring and middle fingers on my right hand.
I told mom it wasn't that bad and proceeded to head into the bathroom to patch myself up. It was soaking through the tissue at an alarming rate as my mother talked me through what I needed to do next. Bandage, gauze, call work, call landlord...
"I can't find any gauze."
"How do you not have gauze?"
This was legitimate question considering my and my parent's track record. Unfortunately, I lacked an interesting answer. I preceded to wrap a bandage around a fresh tissue and make the obligatory phone calls.
The imperturbable Bob said he be down to check it out. My supervisor responded to "I put my hand through a window" with "why did you do that?"
By the time I made it back to work I had to explain to three more men on the crew, who all asked "why did you do that?" like I had gone into a rage and felt the window deserved a beating. Insert eye roll here. Two asked if needed to go to a hospital. No, but I was in serious need of gauze as it had begun to seep through my makeshift tissue and Band Aid barrier.
One of the other editors managed to find the circa 1970s first aid kit that I've come to believe is standard equipment in most newsrooms. From this I retrieved a slightly yellowed package of gauze, which allowed me to finish my shift.
Weeks later I got a package in the mail. It was from the physical plant at Hamilton College where my father was employed as a carpenter. The guys had packed it full of professional level gauze, medical tape and other "necessities" after my dad regaled them with tale of my ill fated window pane. They knew exactly what I needed — after all, they'd spent years patching up my father.
