Jeanine Fritz

My oven self-destructed recently. Actually, it was pretty close to seppuku -- Japanese ritualistic disembowelment favored by dishonored samurai.

I'm not sure it's fair to compare my oven to a samurai, but there's no question its master (that'd be me) shamed it. It's an older oven, but perfectly capable. Sadly, minus a chocolate cherry pie which came out quite nicely back in December, the oven's been subjected to long stretches of gross underuse broken up by the occasional heating of a TV dinner. I now understand that making toast in the oven was cruel -- like asking Yojimbo to take down a kindergartner on crutches.

So I shouldn't have been surprised when the oven basically told me to GFY. Ten minutes after I'd turned it off, the heating element at the bottom of the oven developed a pea-sized, red, glowing bit that would catch fire briefly before going out. Assuming it was busy burning cheese, I sat back down in the living room and waited a few minutes. But ignoring it clearly wasn't putting out the tiny fire, so I got up to take another look.

This wasn't a problem of over-melty cheese; cheese doesn't tend to produce sparks, regardless of how cheap it is. That one tiny, red, glowing bit had moved along the heating element, leaving behind it what looked bubbling hot lava. It reminded me of a Bugs Bunny cartoon where the dynamite has a super long fuse, sparking and glowing and burning until it explodes and turns Elmer Fudd into dust.

I pulled the fire extinguisher out from under the sink, put on an apron (you can ask why, but I won't have an answer), flung open the door and blasted the inside of the oven. Unlike a cartoon, I didn't go flying across the room from the water pressure. Instead, I promptly began choking on the weird, white dusty shit that bounced off the back of the oven and into my face.

The tiny, red dot of demise continued to snake around the oven.

It occurred to me to turn off the oven in a more meaningful way; I would unplug it. After banging it back and forth between the two cupboards for a little while and making no forward progress, it was time to get serious.

I put on my shoes and a jacket, gathered my purse near the door, and then sat down at the computer and signed up for renters' insurance.

Then I called 911.

"What's your emergency?"

"Um. My oven is self-destructing."

Five minutes later, two fire trucks and an ambulance showed up outside my apartment. Seconds later, two very large firemen and a cop were trying to crash in through the door.

"Your place stinks," said the blonde super hot fireman.

I was just thinking, "Well it's not like I had time to clean up for you, assho..." when I realized he meant it was your-oven's-just-been-on-fire kind of stinky.

He grabbed his fancy radio and told everyone on the ground floor to go back to handling real emergencies, pulled the oven from the wall, unplugged the oven, handed me a long-lost pot lid, jammed it back into place and turned to leave.

I went back into the living room, put another log in the fireplace, and sulked. And as I ate cold beans out of a can for dinner, it occurred to me I could just shove the can into the fire like a person who camps, or a hobo. I still haven't fixed the oven, so the likelihood of this happening -- that I attempt microwave dinners and toast and stir-frys in the fireplace -- is pretty high. The ghost of my oven ain't happy about that.