Quote from BabyShark on November 8, 2018, 11:53 pm

I know someone who, to this day, regularly attempts to fiddle, move, and remove objects and foodstuffs in a hot oven with bare hands, resulting in sporadic partial success but also regular surprisingly surprised yelping. What that means is that I'm surprised by their continual surprise that the same behavior results in the same painful burning sensation, year after year.

Oven mitts really don't take that long to put on. And in my mind, it's well worth the tiny effort to protect a supremely valuable asset, namely, the hands. I wear oven mitts. I don't consider this a mark of extraordinary intelligence, in spite of your presumption that I'm assuming just that.

Today, as I opened the hot oven to retrieve my baking, I wasn't expecting the tray to drop sideways into the oven and my mitted hand to recoil in searing pain.

I examined the oven mitt, and there it was, nestled invisibly in the fabric in the crook of the thumb, a centimeter-sized hole.

I rescued the hot tray's contents with care and set it on the stovetop, and immediately pulled off the oven mitt and threw it in the trash, where it belongs. I briefly considered pulling the oven mitt out of the trash to sew up the hole, since it had in fact been a gift from a beloved cousin.

The burn's sting started screaming louder after the initial reaction wore off, and I held my hand under cool running water to soothe the burn while quickly abandoning any notion of redeeming the faulty hand protector.

I started to think about the situation and what I had learned.

You can do the right thing and wear oven mitts and still get burned.

Feeling safe wearing a defective oven mitt is more dangerous than wearing no oven mitt.

It isn't outrageously unreasonable to perform regular checks of your oven mitts for holes and discard any that will be hazardous.

There are always more oven mitts to replace the oven mitts that don't serve the purpose of protecting your hands.

You don't need to hold on to defective oven mitts for sentimental reasons. The person who gave it to you will still always have given it to you, even if you no longer have the object.

Just. Throw. It. Out.