A Cautionary Tale

A cautionary tale

Having nothing to do with Linux much

When I was a kid, a speaker came to our elementary school to talk about safety. One of the things that he did was to take a can of hairspray (Aquanet as I recall: same thing my mother had in her bathroom) and a lighter, and made a flame thrower out of it. Big whoosh of flame quickly stopped. He said he stopped not because the huge gout of flame was dangerous (though it was), but because to leave it going the flame would work it's way back up into the can, and the can would explode with the force of a hand grenade. Real flamethrowers he said were designed to keep this from happening. Hairspray cans were meant for making humidity and hair stay separated, and if misused would potentially kill you. Pictures of maimed hands ensued.

That image stayed with me, and I can safely say I have never ignited a can of hairspray. Even when I saw them do it often on TV and in movies.

A couple of weekends ago I bought 3 cans of compressed air to clean out cooling fins on laptops. Linux laptops, Macbooks, Linux desktop CPU heat sink, you name it (see, I worked in Linux..). One can fell out of the bag onto the floor, and I did not notice it when I unloaded the car.

The next weekend my daughter and her friend get in the car with all their gear for a weekend trip, and find the can. It goes into the back window to get it out of the way. My 1981 car (older than my oldest child!) has a big space in the back window. That was back in the day of the upright roofline.

Another week goes by. The Sun comes out. Outside it is 80 degrees F. You know how cans say things like “Do not puncture or incinerate can, or store then above 120 degree F”. Believe it. At noon last Saturday I came out to the car to go to lunch, and I noticed the back window was shattered. Trim panels on the roof were hanging down. The rear seat dome light was hanging down. A plastic bag was shredded and spewed throughout the car. And buried two inches deep in the right rear door (of a 1981 car, built when they used steel, and put a thin covering of vinyl over it) was the can, mangled. If someone had been in the car....

Those other 2 cans of compressed “air” (or whatever they put in them) are sitting in a shady air conditioned part of the house, to be sure. As they used to say on Hill Street Blues: “Lets be careful out there”.