A Fire, An Electrical Shock, and... I’m Afraid to Use the Oven (Part 2)

So, finally, a couple minutes after the fire had gone out, my husband walks through the door.

"Did it go out?"

"Yeah. It took about five minutes, but it's out now."

My husband walked over and pulled the oven door open while I watched in fear of a backdraft, explosion, or some other odd occurrence for which I had nothing to guard against. He peered inside and looked up at me with a mixture of "I can't believe it's not butter" and disbelief.

"Well, no wonder it caught on fire." He said in a wry voice.

I looked back at him. "What? Was there something in it? Did something fall down?" I'm genuinely concerned that someone (I won't say names *ahem* the short person) has thrown something in the oven that caught on fire.

"Hon... we really need to clean this every once in awhile."

I rolled my eyes at him. "Yeah... yeah... yeah. I know."

"No. Really, Babe. We need to clean this."

Just as a side note here, I hold this strong belief that if you are a wife and you put out on a somewhat regular basis, you should not be required to clean things like ovens. Or floors. Or toilets really, but that one gets done because I have this thing against germs. I just don't think that you should have to do it. One day, I'm going to write Maxim and tell them that they should fund a study. It will consist of the "control group"-- women that do not have children, but are in a married relationship, "Group A"-- women that have children and are expected to do it all, and "Group B"-- women who have children and, for a period of six months, have been given a maid to do the chores. My guess is that the women that are not expected to clean will put out as much as those that do not have children. A woman is only given a certain amount of energy per day. If 50% of it is used at work, and then another 35% of it is used on the kids, that only leaves 15% energy left. Figure it out guys-- would you rather have that energy go toward cleaning ovens or having sex? Hire your wife a maid.*
The above comments are based entirely in opinion and have nothing to do with any type of anything. Spend money at your own risk. LOL

But I digress. The oven needed to be cleaned-- and since I have not been putting out as much as I used to pre-existense of the short person, I supposed at that moment that I was the intended victim that would have to clean the darn thing.

The last time I cleaned the oven was about 15 years ago. It wasn't in this house, and as far as I know this oven has never been cleaned, so it called for a tough chemical known as "Easy Off". I've used it before and the fumes made me sick. It wasn't something I wanted to use with the short person in the house, so we tried to put the cleaning off until the weekend.

Unfortunately, it has come to my attention that we apparently use the oven for dinner A LOT. Every time we'd discuss what we were going to eat, the oven would be the primary heating force. An oven we can't use until it's cleaned. This is bad because it forces us to go with the convenience of eating out, which is not good. Expensive and unhealthy being the biggest downfalls to that plan.

So, I pretty much went nuts. I decided Wednesday that I'd had enough and I was going to get my oven back! I was cleaning it and I'd just have to air out the house by opening all the doors and windows, sub-zero temperature be damned! That night, we went to work taking out the racks and attempting to take out the heating element, which, while we were able to loosen it, would not unplug from the oven. We left it loose so that it would be more easy to lift and clean under.

Thursday, the next night, I went home and got out the vacuum and started sucking up all the little charcoal pieces from our fire days before. All was going well. The oven was off and cold since we hadn't used it in days and it was cleaning up rather nicely with the vacuum.
I reached in, grabbed the heating element to raise it and vacuum more thoroughly under it, and...

Yelped! I couldn't drop it fast enough! I jumped up and plunged my hand into cold water and choked back tears of pain, while fighting with what can only be described as a dumbed up brain.
I was emotionally, intellectually, numb... and my hand felt like I had burned layers of skin. I expected blisters to arrive at any given second and feared taking my hand out of the water. Something just didn't make sense. The oven was off!

I grabbed the phone and called my husband. "I can't finish cleaning the oven. Something's wrong."

"What? What's wrong?"

"I just burned the heck out of my hand. It's going to blister."

"You burned it?"

I could hear the disbelief in his voice. "Yeah. It hurts. The heating element is hot, I don't know why. The oven's off."

"Are you sure you didn't get a shock?"

I've gotten shocked before. Once, when I was rearranging my office and moving my desk, I reached down to unplug a computer cord, not realizing that I'd tugged it half-way free. My fingers went too far down and I grabbed the metal conduits that were still plugged in to the outlet. Vibrating current zapped through my arm, and while I had that same dumbed up feeling in my head, the "heat" was nothing like the vibration of that day. My hand was burned.

"No... it didn't feel like a shock."

"Well, just watch the oven and make sure it doesn't..."

"Doesn't what? It's off."

"Yeah, I know..."

We decided to just let it be for the moment, figuring that when he loosened the screws it messed with something and there was heat going to the element. But, after hanging up the phone, my dumb and numb brain decided to just check once more. Maybe it was my imagination.

I reached in, on the other side from where I'd received my burn, and touched my fingers to the element. Strange, it felt cold. I rested them there for a few seconds and then yanked my hand away. My fingers had started to burn.

I left to go get a pizza.

After my husband got home, he did some investigating and decided that I had, in fact, gotten one heck of a jolt of electricity. His take is that he messed with the ground and it was delivering just enough juice to make my day a little more hella-horrible than usual. He turned off the breaker so that I could clean it.

The problem is that now, I'm scared of the darn thing! And really, it's not just an excuse to get out of cleaning it because I feel I put out enough to escape the chore.

They, those intelligent people of all knowingness, say that things happen in threes. So... first, there was a fire; then, there was an electrocution... God help me, I don't want to know what's next.

If you love me, send food. Pre-cooked would be best.