Back in the days, I mean like EONS ago, I shared an apartment with another student. One day I came home and he welcomed me with anguish and despair in his eyes.
“What happened?” I asked, preparing myself to hear that Armageddon had struck our place.
“You won’t believe this!” he called out hysterically. “The stove is broken! I called the manufacturer in Hamburg, but there is nothing they can do!”
I ran into the kitchen, expecting to see the beggarly remains of our stove, but it looked just like it did when I had left that morning.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, puzzled.
He, still in despair: “It doesn’t work at all!”
Me, still puzzled: “At all?”
He, evermore despaired: “That’s what I said! At all!”
Frustrated with my difficulty to grasp the severeness of the situation, he pulled off one of the knobs.
To make a long story short: a knob for one of the burners was loose. It was an old stove after all, suffering from a lot of wear and tear. To make the long story even shorter: It was an easy fix. A match, broken in half and squeezed inside the beat-up knob, did the trick. With the match working as a filler, the knob reattached firmly to the metal peg, and the burner was back in business.
Ever had conversations like that? A knob breaks off, making it impossible to use ONE out of FOUR burners, but somehow the impression is “the stove doesn’t work AT ALL”?
Between you and me, my former roommate is not the only one prone to exaggerate things and transform them into catastrophes. My mind has a tendency to create mountains out of molehills as well. I just preferred to give an example where someone else is the dummy, not me. 😂 But yeah, between you and me, I had many, many moments where I needed to remind myself, chances are, (figuratively speaking) the red splash on my plate is not a tomato that exploded on me. It’s just ketchup!
Brigitte Schneider
aka Ms. Ketchup
Copyright © 2018, Brigitte Schneider. If you wish to quote text from this article contact the author by leaving a comment.
All I can say, Brigitte, is THANKYOU!! Did I ever need a chuckle right now. I love your sense of humor and way of putting it to paper (so to speak 😉).