I think I'm actually becoming clumsier as I get older.

Recently, my life has been sort of complicated. I've gone from being mostly unemployed, to somehow having three jobs. It's manageable, most of the time, and it will be back down to one in the fairly forseeable future. For now though, one of the jobs I'm working is in the snack bar of the campus bowling alley. The truly pitiful thing is that I like working in fast food, and this is the one I've quit and am just working until my two weeks notice runs out. The good news is that I'm getting better at it, and I hardly burned myself at all today, while my first day on the job resulted in at least three burns. I may have done something worse though.

So there I was, minding my own business, innocently cooking fries for a customer's order, like a good little food service minion. While I waited for them to cook, I decided to wipe down the counter next to them. This was going fairly well, order was being restored and whatnot, when suddenly, a terrible thing happened. I managed to take our lovely timer, which keeps track of all the things that are being cooked, and beeps at us when it's time to take them out, and knock it into the vat of boiling oil on top of the french fries.
<-- Visual Aid

At first, I just froze for a moment. I really had no idea what to do from here, but I was pretty sure that electronic devices do not belong in boiling vats of oil. After a moment, I had the presence of mind to at least pull the fry basket out of the oil, and call for my supervisor's help. We used tongs to retrieve the poor timer, no one was burned, and everything remained more or less intact. And after I spent about ten minutes removing the oil from the timer, the back of the timer, and the batteries which had fallen out on impact, (side note: Do batteries explode if left exposed to burning oil?) I put the device back together, and wonder of wonders: It still worked. More or less. All of the times had to be reset, and, as we later discovered, it no longer beeped properly. But that probably had more to do with something that needed to be reset than it did with my apparent subconscious need to murder electronic devices. Right?

So anyways, the incident passed, and after my shift I ordered a corn-dog from my snack bar (because you try cooking and serving food for four hours and not slowly becoming starving). When my coworker served it to me, it was fairly overcooked, and she said "Sorry if it's crunchy. The timer didn't go off." The jury's still out: innocent mistake or passive-aggressive revenge?