[Click]

Hey kiddies, here’s a very short lesson in tempered glass and thermodynamics.  When you are, say, putting a pizza in an extremely hot oven, please be sure your hands aren’t wet.  Because just maybe a single drop of cold water will splash onto the glass, jump around like a holiday beach-goer on scorching sand, then disappear into the gap between the glass and the metal door.  This won’t be good because once that water meets a tight space between furiously hot metal and furiously hot glass, it will itself become furious and then some scientific stuff will happen that results in this:

I had just put in the pizza and heard a small [click] from the oven.  Funny, you somehow know the difference between a normal click and a problem click.  I identified the cause and even the source of the fracture, a centerpoint from which all the cracks radiate, seen here:

So far the glass hasn’t fallen into the oven like a shower of unpleasant piñata candy but I’m still closing the door as if a live bomb is in there.  Lesson learned.

About Peter Soutowood

Writer, architect, father, husband.