Dropping the Iron

I was a one man comedy routine tonight. Since I needed some good clothes for the interview, I knew that I would need to do some ironing. I didn't see this as a problem. When I worked at the insurance company I wore dress clothes everyday, so ironing was a weekly chore for me. Now, however, I am a little out of practice and it showed tonight.

Somehow I managed to knock the iron off of the ironing board and into a wastebasket. The odds of this happening are beyond me, but I managed to do it on the first try. Actually I did it without trying to do it at all. The iron followed a perfect trajectory into the wastebasket without any computer guidance. All that it needed was for me to shout no in slow motion as it descended.

Once the iron was in the wastebasket, a plastic bag instantly melted onto the iron for my pleasure. I could not believe what I had done. In all of my years of ironing, this had never happened before. What made it worse was that I was not even using my own iron.

By this time I am swearing profusely and wondering how the hell I am going to get melted plastic off of the iron. I unplug the iron and start to access the damage. One thing in my favor is that the melted plastic isn't that thick, because it was just a bag. The other thing that I was thankful for was that it didn't smell that bad, because there wasn't enough burnt plastic to give off an odor. Despite these two things in my favor, I still had to figure out how to get it off without burning myself.

An idea comes to me as I stare at the iron. I go to the kitchen and get a knife and I slowly start to scrape the plastic off with the flat edge of the knife. As soon as the plastic is off the iron and onto the knife it hardens into harmless little shreds.

About ten minutes later, everything was back to normal minus one plastic bag. Its amazing how what started out as small chore grew into a small crisis for me.