Burned Desk

This is what happens when you have a kettle heating element to heat your cups of coffee... and leave it on, so it glows red then explodes with a bang and leaves a little bonfire on your desk as your pens and paper and stuff catch fire.

This was caused by my placing a rocker switch between the element and the wall plug, and knocking the rocker so it turned on. My back was turned, so the bang was the first I knew about it. But my back was turned to put my shoes on: I was about to leave the house a few seconds later, so it could have been a lot worse.

Now I understand why these things are not for sale in the UK any more. They are quite, quite deadly. I have also heard tales of people getting serious shocks from using them in metal cups, or just from the electricity passed along the wet cable (yes, it gets wet from steam, too.

Since people always ask, the items you can see are:

• Foreground: my microphone stand.
• Behind that: a mug with the Furcadia logo on.
• Behind that: a measuring tape.
• Behind that: a kinder egg center. I got a holepunch in it! :D
• Right of that: Duct tape.
• Behind that: You can just see the base of my monitor, with some scissors on and a part of my headphones cable.
• Below that: A 3.5" floppy disk (I know, an anachronism!), with NT PWD RECOVER written on it, in pink hilighter, ontop of the biro saying it is a backup of "Fullduplex3", ontop of the original ink saying it's an OBM "Pc Server EISA Configuration Diskette v 4.02".
• Resting on that: A nie chunky multihead screwdriver.
• Beside that: a plastic knife.
• Below that: The top of a tin of mushy peas... yes, I ate them cold, with the plastic knife.
• Under that: an envelope from the UK's IRS, something about tax stuff. It was being used as a mousemat, but now a hole has been burned in it.
• Behind the hole: A 20p piece, worth about $0.34c at the time of writing, representing the majority of my current wealth.
• Behind that: The button that just came off my last pair of jeans.

If you're really, truly bored enough to want to see my whole room (which is just as messy) you can see it here