{"id":9033,"date":"2022-07-10T16:08:24","date_gmt":"2022-07-10T20:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/?p=9033"},"modified":"2022-07-13T03:32:58","modified_gmt":"2022-07-13T07:32:58","slug":"the-happy-accident-that-almost-costed-my-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/2022\/07\/10\/the-happy-accident-that-almost-costed-my-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The &#8216;happy accident&#8217; that almost costed my life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wCsO56kWwTc\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<em>&#8220;We don&#8217;t make mistakes. We have happy accidents.&#8221; -Bob Ross<\/em><br \/>\nThat may be true, but not all accidents are &#8216;happy&#8217;. However having accidents is what made us as a species evolve to learn from those accidents, and how to prevent them from happening again. So I guess this is what he always meant by a &#8216;happy&#8217; accident.<br \/>\nBut the accident that happened to me, wasn&#8217;t &#8216;happy&#8217;. Infact it nearly costed my<br \/>\nlife.<br \/>\nSo this happened about a month ago to this date (and at some times I can still smell the mistake I made). I had to move my furniture around where my bed was on the wall with my computer (and vice versa). This took pretty much all day to do due to how heavy some of my furniture is (and needing to take almost constant breaks).<br \/>\nIt was around 2am when I was cleaning everything up, trying to plug my computer back in and stuff like that. After finally completing this one task and having it boot up, I decided to rest for awhile while listening to Alexa play music. After my break I went back to work, this time grabbing my wireless headphone dongle. I didn&#8217;t move my clock to the other side of the wall. Figured I&#8217;d wait &#8217;till the afternoon so I wouldn&#8217;t wake up my mother with the hammering.<br \/>\nSo I tried to put it on the shelf that&#8217;s above my computer. And on this display cabinet <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">was<\/span><\/em> what was known as a &#8216;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Galileo_thermometer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Galileo Thermometer<\/a>&#8216;. &#8230;I think you can see what happened next as I was trying to put the dongle up there (but also twist the cable to not show the dongle&#8217;s annoying blinking light).<br \/>\nI wasn&#8217;t paying attention and I should had taken it down, and before I could<br \/>\nreact&#8230; nearly everything on the top shelf, including the thermometer that broke open all over my computer cable, soaking everything. I was getting a very strong smell of<br \/>\nalcohol, but the only thing on my mind was &#8216;shut. down. your. computer. NOW!!!&#8217; (as the unknown clear liquid also got inside of it). I was in a state of shock, couldn&#8217;t move knowing what I just did. But I knew I needed to clean up all the glass pieces (with my fingers). I am extremely fortunate none of the glass cut my fingers open.<br \/>\nI was getting a film feeling on my tongue as I kept picking up the pieces, forced to inhale the fumes of whatever the hell this strange clear liquid was. It definitely wasn&#8217;t water. Water wouldn&#8217;t smell like alcohol. But finally I had most of the glass picked up. Also had to pick up small pieces on the carpet too.<br \/>\nI tried to dry up the liquid with whatever I had available to me (old T-Shirts). I also feared my computer is dead now. When I had everything cleaned up I opened up the tempered glass side panel and saw droplets of the liquid on the other side, proving it got inside and soaked everything in my computer. So I hoped by grabbing my hand de-duster and blow the inside I could possibly dry out the liquid. Hopefully I did. I even opened up the other panel. Thankfully it didn&#8217;t soak the cables.<br \/>\nClosed this panel and let the computer attempt to air dry, while I continued cleaning up my room&#8230; wanting to kick myself in the ass several fucking times over what I did. It was around 4:20am when I finally got done. Then I went to sit back down infront of my monitors&#8230; and prayed to the all-mighty. Giving him a promise that if I ever break it, he can make my computer not work anymore.<br \/>\nI then reached over and pushed the power button, and it booted! A God given miracle!!<br \/>\nAnd it has booted since. But it was late and I didn&#8217;t play any games. I was still bothered by the alcohol smell.<br \/>\n&#8211;<br \/>\n5am came and I went into the bathroom, trying to look for something I can use to neutralize the smell. Found one of those air fresheners that you twist open. It was the smell of Lavender. Placed it on my end table after opening it up, then tried to get some sleep. Little did I know, this smell would save my life.<br \/>\nCouldn&#8217;t sleep that night as I still had a strong smell of alcohol in my nose. But the smell<br \/>\nof Lavender finally helped me to relax enough to get some sleep. The next day after I opened up my door, the smell was filling up the entire house but it wasn&#8217;t that bad.<br \/>\nI then used my vacuum cleaner to suck up any glass pieces I didn\u2019t see. But somehow by doing so it released the smell and it was really filling up the house, which was making my mother not feel well. She tried everything she had to remove the smell but to no avail, which was making me feel upset over what I&#8217;ve done.. especially when I discovered the source of the smell. It&#8217;s &#8216;ethyl alcohol&#8217;, and it says it&#8217;s &#8216;volatile&#8217; and &#8216;flammable&#8217;.. OSHI&#8211;!! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?!<br \/>\nSure it was an accident, but she felt it would force us to leave our house. But after calling a neighbor who gave a small suggestion to use Fabreeze with Lavender.. the smell finally started to die down. We may had finally found how to fight it (and win). I went over to the store with my mother to buy more of those twist open air fresheners, and a bag of charcoal.<br \/>\nWhen we got home, my mother said &#8220;now&#8217;s the true test&#8221;. I opened the door and I could no longer smell the alcohol smell. Success!! We won&#8217;t have to temporarily move out afterall! She had me open up the bag of charcoal (typically used for grills) and told me to put it under my computer table (all the way back), and it will absorb the smell \u201cwith time\u201d. But I broke down in tears after it. I couldn&#8217;t stop apologizing for what I&#8217;ve done, but my mother said the Lavender was helping and all it needed was time to fully get rid of the smell.<\/p>\n<p>To this day I still have the bag of charcoal under my computer table. Also it turns out the smell wasn&#8217;t ethyl alcohol as she claimed it was the smell of gasoline. So likely it<br \/>\nwas Kerosene, which can be removed with the smell of white distilled vinegar. The reason for this finding, is after she suggested I bring my computer out to the garage. If it truly was ethyl alcohol, the heat from my computer would had ignited it. And after all the effort to test my computer under load (for 10 minutes) didn&#8217;t do anything, I was pretty confident what we were dealing with, wouldn&#8217;t kill us. Not to mention it wasn&#8217;t messing up my computer.<\/p>\n<p>So yeah&#8230; that could had been disastrous. But luckily it wasn&#8217;t. Yet, I can&#8217;t help feel that maybe I should see the doctor one day just to see if I don&#8217;t have &#8216;severe liver damage&#8217;.<br \/>\nI feel fine though. So, that proves it wasn&#8217;t ethyl alcohol. Plus I didn&#8217;t feel dizzy, I didn&#8217;t feel nauseous. I wasn&#8217;t throwing up. None of those warning signs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;We don&#8217;t make mistakes. We have happy accidents.&#8221; -Bob Ross That may be true, but not all accidents are &#8216;happy&#8217;. However having accidents is what made us as a species evolve to learn from those accidents, and how to prevent &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/2022\/07\/10\/the-happy-accident-that-almost-costed-my-life\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,25,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-drama","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9033"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9040,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9033\/revisions\/9040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/general\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}