Some of you may have already heard this story, but I think it's a good one, and merits a retelling!
In my humanities class, we recently finished reading Plato's
Symposium, and we had an assignment to prepare speeches of our own on the topic of love. (For those of you unfamiliar with
The Symposium, it's basically an account of a symposium where several Greek philosophers made brief speeches on love, the main speech being, of course, Socrates'.) Anyway, for our class, our recitation groups (7-10 people with group leaders that are sophomores or juniors in the Engineering Honors program) each had a mini-symposium of our own, where we cooked and ate food, gave speeches, and hung around and talked.
Our symposium was a Sunday breakfast symposium, and we had all sorts of good food: cinnamon rolls, muffins (apple cinnamon, chocolate chip and blueberry), fruit salad (with watermelon, mango, kiwi, blue-, rasp-, straw-, and black-berries), eggs with peppers and cheese and onions, and milk, hot chocolate, cider, etc...
It was all very tasty food. I was in charge of one of the pans of eggs, and another girl was in charge of the other. We were using the front two burners of the stove, and the back two had things cooling on them- an empty glass baking pan, and another metal pan. As we cooked, I noticed that the other girl's eggs were not cooking nearly as fast as mine. In fact, it seemed as though they weren't cooking at all. Because they weren't - we realized that her burner wasn't actually on. So, we turned it on, and went back to cooking. About 30 seconds later, I realized that the reason her burner wasn't on was that the burner behind hers was (somebody had just turned the wrong knob). On that burner was the empty glass baking pan. I quickly turned the burner off, because that was not a good thing.
We went back to cooking our eggs. About a minute later, the glass pan, with no warning, exploded. REALLY exploded. As in, pieces flew six feet, and there were more pieces of glass than appeared to have been in the volume of the pan before it exploded (you know how it is with glass things). The two of us just stood there, staring, for a few seconds, and then burst out laughing uncontrollably while everyone else came rushing over to see what had happened.
Casualties: my pan of eggs, which had to be garbage-disposaled because it was full of glass.
Neither of us were cut or hurt in any way (even though glass bounced off of us as it exploded), and her pan of eggs was able to be run through a really fine sieve and cooked anyway. I made a new pan of eggs, and they were really delicious.
