Flame Away

Compare the following two stories:

STORY NUMBER 1

“So I put the pan on the burner, turn around to read the recipe, next thing I know, the whole thing’s gone up in flames! Like HUGE flames! Can you believe it? Guess I’m not gonna be the next Bobby Flay, har har har!”

STORY NUMBER 2

“Our house burnt down. We lost everything.”

To be clear: we’re talking about hypothetical situations here; the above stories are fabricated, but everyone has almost definitely heard a true version of both.

The tones differ quite a bit, don’t they? The first presents a terrifying moment that has been fossilized by time into a funny anecdote. The second presents something entirely bleak.

And yet, if you dig into story number 2, you might learn that its origins echo almost exactly story number 1, the only difference being what’s implied by the humor in story number 1: they put the fire out.

But how?

Maybe they managed to get the pan quickly under a running faucet. Maybe they had a full-sized fire hydrant nearby (discharging it and making a mess not just of the pan and its contents but everything nearby). Or maybe they had one of these.

What are these exactly? Well, take a look at this picture:

Honestly, we share this image so that we may tip our cap to the manufacturer. Thank you for understanding that, when it comes to a fire safety product, nobody needs a bunch of “clever” marketing jargon. There’s an alternative universe where this is called “Flame-B-Gone” and where they bury the bit about the size of the job in some tiny back-of-label text.

What are they? A thing to stop fires. What kind of fires? Small ones. How do they stop them? With dry powder, which means it can fight grease.

Neat, right?

So, get a couple. You will either stash them under your kitchen sink and forget all about them (the best case scenario), or you’ll use one and be thankful you had it (the not-so-good-but-better-than-story-number-2 scenario).