For just a second, I didn’t move. Nobody did.
A silence dropped over the entire room for what seemed like an hour. I had no idea what had happened, but now I could smell burnt hair.
I looked down at the hair on my arms — most of it gone, and what was left was curled up like Christmas ribbon. A coworker looked at me and said, “Dude, your eyebrows.”
My eyebrows were gone, and so too were my eyelashes. My bangs looked like the few remaining follicles on my arms.
And that smell.
If you’ve ever worked a pilot light before, you know what happened. I pushed and held the gas valve knob, which momentarily shut off the gas flow to the pilot light and choked out the flame. But I failed to twist it so that it stayed off. So as I worked to clean the fry hopper, the pilot light gas trickled (luckily, only trickled) out and built up inside the cavity, just waiting for some dumbass kid like me to come along and present the flame.
My father-in-law had a great saying, “It don’t pay to be dumb unless you show it.”
I got my money’s worth that day.
The good news is that now, over 35 years later, I’m extra diligent around gas-fired appliances. Fool me once…And I’ll never forget that smell.
Oh, and this was 1985. Of course, I stayed and worked the rest of my shift.
