When I went to college, I bought a mini-fridge. We went through a lot together, Stinky Pete and I, like the time I left Bagel Bites in him over winter break and had to carry him down three flights of stairs so I could hose out the large, circular clumps of mold that were assaulting my nostrils with their pungent death spores and, more importantly, trying to steal my friend from me.
Every summer apart from Stinky was a hardship. After I’d said a quick goodbye to my roommate and girlfriend, I’d spend the evening with my fridge, trying to sneak in just a few more hours before the inevitable. I knew how lonely he’d be, unplugged and unused, and I did my best to comfort him.
Then, one fall, I got back to school, pulled Stinky Pete out of storage, and opened him up, only to discover that all his shelves were missing!
What could have happened to them? I racked my brain, but could find no answer. Before long, the lost shelves began to haunt my every waking moment, and when I slept, I dreamt of those perfectly sculpted pieces of glass. I forgot to shower, to eat, to hope, and my life became one downward spiral of shelfless horror. Do you know how inconvenient a fridge without shelves is? Food storage quickly became nothing more than a twisted, unending game of perishable Jenga, and I was too scared to try to actually remove anything from the precarious fortress.
When you find yourself in this sort of situation, there’s only one thing to do. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never picked up a hammer before, it doesn’t matter if every time your dad tried to make you help with home projects you ran screaming, and who cares if you aren’t even aware that a hammer probably isn’t a relevant tool for constructing a glass shelf. My fridge needed me, and I couldn’t turn my back anymore.
I went to the local shelving store and asked for their finest piece of shelvery, but they didn’t really have any of that because they were a Home Depot and those places scare me, so I bought a piece of shelf-looking glass and invested in a glass cutter, which is about as safe in my hands as two putty knives in the hands of a child.
I combined the glass cutter and glass in the only way I knew how, namely in the middle of my floor and with a great deal of trepidation. Turns out you’re supposed to be pretty sure of yourself and make one clean stroke, but like a first-time headsman, it took me quite a few tries to hack my way through, which led to a lot of thin lines of glass on my floor and an edge that was as jagged as the shoreline of my love life.
I had no reasonable way to sand the death trap, so I took it outside and just rubbed it on the cement for a long time, pouring water on it as I went because I know water has something to do with erosion, and I figured erosion was like slow-paced sanding. Pieces kept chipping off and making it worse, but eventually there was a pretty long period without chipping, and I figured that was about as smooth as I’d get it, so with great ceremony, I put it in the fridge.
Flash forward: it’s 2011 and Stinky Pete has been enjoying his new shelf. We have some friends over, including this guy Nick. He’s the kind of badass who’ll punch a bear just cause “it was asking for it,” but I guess he’s not particularly shelf savvy, so when he reaches into the fridge to grab a beer, he jabs his hand right into the thing, and suddenly he’s bleeding all over the fridge and the floor and just staring at his hand in shock.
He was pretty tough about it. In fact, this was another one of those utterly emasculating moments. He just walked to my closet, grabbed a hot glue gun, and sprayed the burning stuff all over the wound, wrapped it up in duct tape, continued playing beer pong…and won. But at some point, the wound opened back up and became a mini Niagara Falls of bleediness. I’m on the verge of fainting because I hate things that remind me of Niagara Falls, but some other people who have fewer negative associations take Nick over to our neighbor’s house who’s more medically prepared and less faint-y, and while we’re all out of the apartment…
A thief sneaks in!
Since we’re a trusting, naive bunch of blokes, we’d left a brand new Macbook Pro, the Holy Grail of opportunistic temptation, sitting just inside the door. The thief promptly scoops it up and high-tails it out of there.
We’re all too busy trying to staunch my fridge’s handiwork to notice, but somehow Nick sees the guy, jumps up, and sprints outside, hurtling toward the thief like a gigantic boulder of fury. We think he’s just in the throes of a blood frenzy, but before we can even give each other accurately confused looks, he’s out of sight.
Apparently, Nick chases this guy through the entire apartment complex and out into the street. He’s gibbering like a madman and waving his bloody hand everywhere, and it’s spraying like crazy. The thief takes one look behind him and freaks the hell out, so the guy, in an attempt to save himself with a well-timed distraction, hurls the laptop through the air. Nick’s split-second-animal-instinct brain determines that saving the laptop is the highest priority and makes this epic dive for the thing, soon-to-be hand-stump stretched to its absolute limits—
And falls a couple inches short.
…
The laptop shattered, but it’s ok, cause Apple gave us a new one for free! All thanks to my fridge, because who knows if the thief would’ve chucked the laptop if he hadn’t been so terrified of Nick’s gruesome hand, which was only as frightening as it was because of my shelf-building skills…but then again, I guess we wouldn’t have been out of the apartment if the fridge hadn’t sliced him up, and then he wouldn’t’ve had to go the emergency room, and he wouldn’t have that hideous scar, and I wouldn’t’ve had to spend the night bleaching blood out of my carpet like a serial killer, and I wouldn’t need to keep going to therapy because I no longer feel safe in my home…
Maybe I should try to improve my craftsmanship skills.
Reasonably Ludicrous 