i thought it was for storage

Story time! This is another classic.

I lived in my first apartment during my junior year of college. I’m not sure where my roommate was at the time, but I unpacked most of our common items (kitchen, bathroom) and put them away myself while we were moving in.

A few weeks later I woke up to find the roommate standing beside my bed staring at me.

After I recovered from being so startled, I was like “what’s wrong?”

And she just stood there wringing her hands and finally said, “Um, the stove is on fire.”

I leaped out of bed and asked, “Are there flames?” and she was like “yeah, inside the oven. I turned it off, but it’s still burning. I was making muffins.”

So we take the four steps or so to the kitchen, and sure enough, something inside the oven is in flames. We wait for the flames to die down and for the stove to cool off, and then she opens the oven and takes out the scorched muffin pan.

Then she bends down and pulls out the bottom drawer – the one where I’d stored the frying pan and cookie sheets when I was unpacking.

And she’s like, “Who put pans in the broiler?”

I was like, “Dude, that’s a storage drawer. The broiler’s inside the oven on the top.”

She insists that it’s a broiler, I insist that it’s storage, and I’m like “every place I’ve ever lived has had a stove where the bottom drawer was for storing stuff.”

Finally, she says, “Wait. Have you ever lived in a house with a gas stove?”

Well, no, I hadn’t.

She’s like “you idiot, on gas stoves the broiler is down there because that’s where the pilot light is.”

Oh.

And I dimly remembered wondering why the drawer was so shallow and had that weird plate attached to it.

So when I’d put the frying pan in and she turned on the oven, the wooden handle caught fire, and that’s what we’d seen.

That was the first of my many apartment mishaps, but I bet every mother figure connected with me or with my roommate has heard that story at least once by now. My mother particularly enjoys telling people what a jackass her oldest daughter is.

But it’s your fault, Mom, for not teaching me about gas stoves.

It’s all your fault!