What Puberty Made Me Do

Less Like A Fossil, More Like A Piece Of Bread

About 8 years ago I lived in a different house and at the time the kitchen and dining room were in separate rooms. One school morning me and my brother came down for breakfast which was toast. We waited in the dining room until mum came in with a plate of toast whilst the next batch was being toasted. All three of us sat down at the table (dad would have been there too, but he was working upstairs and had his breakfast earlier) and we must have been sat there eating for 10 minutes or so and we were busy chatting away. That is, until when my mum starts to sniff the air and looks at us both with alarm on her face.

"What's that smell?" she says, getting up swiftly, swinging the door wide open to find a suspiciously large amount of hot fog come billowing into the room. Wait, not fog; it was smoke.

Here's a bit of extra information that would help with this situation:

The house that this story happened in was not ours as such- we were renting it off of my aunt and uncle as we had just come over from a different country (Canada) and needed a place to rent out as soon as possible so our aunt and uncle offered one of their places out for rent which we lived in for a few years.

Anyway, so I remember after we realised something was burning, I thought I was going to die. There have been a lot of times in my life where I have thought I was going to die, but to be honest I am one of the most dramatic people you'll ever meet so I'm not even surprised at this information I'm sharing.

So, this was one of the many times I thought I was going to burn alive in that house until I heard mum shout out that it was just the toaster and that it looked worse than it actually was. Bearing in mind this happened on a snowy winter's day which we happened to be going to school in in an hour or so.

Me and my brother never moved from our seats, we had just stopped eating our toast, wondering what and where the smoke was coming from in the kitchen.

It was only when I realised there was a fire that I thought I'd seize the moment of the only exciting opportunity in my life to act like the casts on Emmerdale and Coronation Street act when there's a fire. I started coughing and 'wheezing' dramatically, asking my mum for some water and felt like asking her if we needed to buy a new house now that ours has burned down to the ground. She DID give me a bottle of water and told us to go upstairs to clean our teeth for school as we would be leaving in a bit and needed to be ready.

By this time, my dad had come down asking what was wrong- probably because he could smell the burning of our toaster and the demolished charcoal-bread that sat guiltily after the 'fire'. Honestly, I think when I was at a young age, I wanted to get the biggest and best reaction out of anyone and everyone. It got to the point when I probably seemed annoying which is why I changed friends more than I changed my interests. Unfortunately, I'm blaming childhood me for managing to hang onto that so-called trait of mine of changing friends every few years. I was never the type of kid to have one friend from when I was a baby and still keep them when I start college. I love reading books about that sort of close friendship, but it just never works out for me for some reason, especially in real life!

The last thing I remember of this story was leaving the house in the snow which crunched beneath my feet and glancing at the melted and once-on-fire toaster which was now filled with white ash and small black blobs which once used to look less like a fossil and more like a piece of bread. Then I remember when I came home that day and actually saw what it had done to the cupboards above where the toaster was and -holy hell- that was a sight and a half, alright!

After a few years passed, I remembered the whole ordeal and asked my mum about the fire and the toaster. I never even realised this, but the fire alarm we had never went off even when it was surrounded in smoke. Mum told me that it was a lucky thing we've learned from the experience because we put the smoke detector on the wall on the stairs.

The wall.

We later learnt from the fire brigade on their yearly visits that it doesn't work if you put it at any sort of angle or wall, it has to be directly flat on the ceiling.

I never knew that. I guess it's something you don't think of much, especially in our house.

So now we keep our smoke detectors directly flat above us on the ceiling, and so should you! Because I'm not one to be dramatic or anything, but this could literally happen to anyone and it surprisingly happens a lot so just check your alarms if they are for fires, carbon monoxide (*ahem*) and make sure you won't go through a situation as dramatic as mine may or may not have been.