When toasters go bad
When you consider the worst things that can happen when living in student accommodation, top of the list would have to be the life threatening. What surprised me the most, when I first moved into halls, was just how likely it is for students to find themselves in near death situations on a weekly basis. Now that you’ve moved away from the safety and comfort of home, chances are you will witness at least one fire, at least one gas scare (of the carbon monoxide or plain old ‘left the cooker on’ variety) and a dozen or so injuries to property or person.
There is a multitude of advice available that seems pretty over the top; who would consider it important to ‘supervise’ their toaster? Well me, for one, having lived through the Langwith A Block fire of 2006, caused by our combustible toaster. A year on I like to think of the time I saved the lives of my five housemates by conscientiously supervising the toasting of my ciabatta, and being thus poised to put the flaming piece of electrical equipment in the garden when the time was ripe. That’s one lesson learnt, although the one about buying toasters worth more than £3 hasn’t quite sunk in yet.
The most dangerous aspect of such incidents, and peculiarly therefore the funniest, is the steadfast refusal of those involved to believe themselves to be in any kind of danger. Laziness prevails after the number of fire drills we’ve been put through over the years, so it’s hard to spring into action when the alarms go off at 7.30am. Hard, that is, until you see the plumes of smoke escaping from the kitchen. Add to that the fact that it just seems so unlikely that anything genuinely dangerous will happen in such a laid back environment, which I presume led to my former housemate’s explanation of leaving me asleep upstairs as our carbon monoxide detector went into overdrive; ‘I didn’t want to panic’. Or his hapless friend’s insistence on googling the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning before he agreed to evacuate.
There’s nothing like a bit of danger and excitement to bond people. Fire alarms unite freshers with people they never knew existed, let alone lived in the corridor above them, and sometimes calling out the fireman is the only chance we get to interact with the non-student community. Just don’t admit to them you knew the toaster was faulty, and you should all be fine.
