Heating Rod

My first experience with a heating rod! I really thought that I would use this blog more constructively. Maybe to pen down some musings, some philosophical fundas that come to my mind as I sit here in IIT all alone in my room. Maybe a small reflection on life, on how I have taken everything for granted at home whereas here I have to fend for myself. Wash my own clothes, take my own thrash out, clean my room and stuff like that. But NO! here I sit while AC/DC belts out “Inject the Venom” and I write about my experience with a heating rod. Hardly the kind of thing you would expect. Then again who knows what you would expect huh?

Ok coming back to the rod bit of this post. Well rods are “kind of” banned in rooms, basically any heating device is. Oh and it is finally becoming cold here. I mean, I usually bathe in the night (not to say that the water is much warmer in the morning – it is just that I never wake up in time to have a bath on most days). I have heard a lot about how to use one of these things.
“You have to immerse the rod completely in the water else you will get a burning smell and the coil will burn out”

“You have to take care not to get a shock by putting the whole damn thing into the water.”

“NEVER EVER leave the coil on when it is not in water”

Yeah I know you want to know the answer to the number one question (at least it was mine)
How in heavens name do you suspend the rod at that exact depth in the water?
“You have to use a coat hanger to suspend the rod”

Ok fine with me. And mind you I knew all this theory before I had even seen a heating rod/coil in my life.

So I saunter into my good buddy’s room and ask him for a rod. He points out to a corner of the room where the sun don’t shine where he has stashed his rod/coil (remember it is banned) (and remember the “rod/coil” is something that I have never seen in my life). So I am staring at something that looks to me like an egg beater and that appliance is staring right back at me but… I don’t know what it looks like!!

So after a few choice expletives me almost ex-good buddy (“almost ex” because I needed that rod and I wasn’t going to get no frost bite where the sun don’t shine! ;-) ) got up and showed me where the rod was. It was a sort of rod like coil. Much like an egg beater as I have told you before. So I wrap it up in a piece of news paper (the whole Brand Equity supplement – I am doing my MBA here for crying out loud!) and smuggle it back to my room.
I then attempted to put into practice all the theory I have gathered on heating rods. I fill a bucket with water and slowly but surely lift it and very diligently spill a steady stream of water all across the diagonal of my room to the far side where the plug point is located.

Now the scene in my room is three quarter bucket of water in one corner of my room and a small brook no not brook – they usually have nice poetic connotations, but a stream heading down to my balcony. When I immerse the rod in the water I find that I needn’t stand there holding the rod as this rod has a sort of clip using which you can attach it to the side of the bucket. Thank all that is good for army canteens from where this good buddy of mine had procured this high quality rod.

Well here is what my room looks like now. We have a heating rod immersed in a semi full bucket of water in one corner of the room, a small stream flowing down to the balcony, a mug of water in a state of readiness (in case of a fire you see), my towel and sundry other items that I need for my abulitions.

So the water is being heated. I know because when I put my hand into the water it wasn’t too hot, so I took the liberty of checking out the rod on the tip of my little finger. Anyways my good friend has told me that the water will take 5 to seven minutes to get warm. I am sure he didn’t expect me to sit with a stopwatch and time the @&%$@# thing. So it doesn’t get “hot” in the stipulated time. I stir the rod in the water around a bit and I leave it there. Your good friend (aka Moi!) doesn’t see that the rod is touching the side of a very thermoplastic, red and white bucket. The point of contact is well below the water level and now if I have to use the bucket, it serves only half the purpose it was designed for.

Anyway this time I don’t wait for the water to heat up and am about my own business, when SUDDENLY I smell burning plastic. Now from the time I served in my engineering college all instincts were screaming ELECTRICAL FIRE!! This was followed by a hissing sound. (No I still don’t know from where that sound came). So I rush into my room and AAARRGGGHHHHHHH!!! The floor is slowly filling with water. RIGHT! How can a floor “fill” with water?? The dish-head who designed this building and the bowl-tops who actually built it made my room in the same way. So if we have water in my room it fills slowly but surely after which it flows into the balcony and fills there. I can see the rod hissing and an ever expanding hole in the bucket wall. Gone were all the thoughts of throwing water (remember the mug), so I put the switch off and remove the rod. In hindsight that was the correct decision. It would have been foolish to add more water into my room.

The water was scalding hot and there was no room to put in cold water. I am so irritated now that I just open the cold water and let it flow. I pick up the mug and cleanse myself.

I understandably haven’t used a heating rod since.