Rose2Bear wrote:
"Oh my goodness, I am sitting here and by no prompts - no button pushing or anything like that, the DVD player randomally ejected itself and is now sitting open."
When I read this, I had a momentary vision of your DVD player ejecting itself from your TV cabinet and landing on the floor. Quite funny. I have two stories. One from work, and one from home, and both involving explosions. First, from work. I work with many different kinds of computers, and this event truly took the cake. I walked by one of the offices one day and I heard a barely audible ticking noise. My curiosity peaked, I followed it to the monitor sitting on the desk (a HUGE model, as large as some televisions, and it was not a flat panel but a big tube monitor). I thought nothing more about it until I mentioned it to one of our hardware people, who went into the room with me. He said that the picture tube was shot and we needed to unplug it without switching it on. The owner of the machine said it was fine,and it ticked like that a lot. He moved to turn it on, and the engineer told him not to do it, as it could cause the picture tube to overload. With a laugh, the owner turned it on. With a bang and a huge flash, the back of the tube went up. The screen was actually crazed over with cracks from the explosion, and acrid bluish smoke started issuing from the back of the monitor. We pulled the plug, ran for the fire extinguisher and stood nearby for about ten minutes before we worked up the courage to take it off the desk and put it out in the parking lot. From then on everyone did what that engineer suggested without question.
The other episode at home involved a quart cup of water in the microwave. My wife put said cup in to heat up, and set the microwave for many minutes. It ran, and stopped, and nobody was nearby, so nobody got the cup out. Good thing too, since about ten seconds after it stopped, it simply detonated. The force of the water blew the door open and threw steaming hot water all over the floor and stove. Afterward I read up on the matter since we were both quite confused why it happened, and it turns out that sometimes standing water can heat up past boiling, but if it doesn't develop the starting bubbles it can get hot enough that a good deal of it will "pop" into steam if it's agitated. It's very rare for such a thing to happen, but it does on occasion, and I'm just thankful that nobody was near enough to be scalded. Since then we're careful not to heat water for more than a few minutes at a time without stirring it or shaking it, just because it still makes us nervous.
Virg
