Flatmates leaving stuff on, do you mention it?

Got in from work today and my flatmade had left the iron on, sitting on the mantelpiece. The wall was melting a little and the mantel was a bit black but no major damage done. I mailed straightaway to say it, just cos I figured it's best to point this out, and I was kinda shocked.

Would you do this? Is reminding someone not to be forgetful effective? Or is someone just as likely to forget anyway?

Also relate similar stories...

I fear the latter but I would certainly mention something like this. Perhaps with a rising tone of voice.

Well, if it was an isolated one-time error, I wouldn't worry about it -- can happen to anyone -- and yes, pointing out that someone nearly burned down the building will probably be effective in making them totally paranoid about irons (and stoves) for a few decades.

um YES you mention it when a roommate almost burns a hole in the wall

I mean, there's stuff you let go ("argh, you left a bowl in the sink") and there's stuff you don't ("argh, you burned everything I own")

xpost - I mean, I once left an electric burner on when I was maybe 14, and it has apparently turned me into the kind of person who gets out of bed to double-check the stove, even if I have a clear and specific memory of having turned stuff off -- he will likely remember this every time he irons for a good long while

he/she

YEEESSSSSSSS OMG. My roommate left a candle burning in her room that didn't even do any damage as far as I know (except to use up my fancy expensive scented candle) and I mentioned it, because I don't want to know what would happen the next time. Plus she has a beloved dog that would die in a fire if we weren't home so a note to the wise is sufficient in this case.

I realized that I left the coffee maker on one day and it triggered like a year of OCD checking to make sure that everything was off/windows were locked when I left the house.

I'm not even sure if coffee makers catch fire...

xpost - I mean, I once left an electric burner on when I was maybe 14, and it has apparently turned me into the kind of person who gets out of bed to double-check the stove, even if I have a clear and specific memory of having turned stuff off -- he will likely remember this every time he irons for a good long while

don't blame the burner for your shortcomings!

I blame the teapot, actually, for being a non-whistling kind, so you can put on some tea and then forget about it for 2 hours

... what is the point of a non-whistling teapot?

it helps you burn the house down. . . slowly

xp there's a surprising number of those out there and it makes no goddamn sense

The lid would at least clatter a bit, but I think I was into a movie and didn't notice. Look, I think everyone is allowed one fire goof per decade of life, no judgments.

The major hazard I always see or hear about now is people who come home super-drunk, decide they really need food, and then somehow pass out or forget before they finish cooking -- years ago my girlfriend's immediate neighbor did this, but I somehow managed to sleep through a team of firemen knocking his door down. I knew another guy who did this and had the pan involved hanging in the kitchen -- cheap pan sitting on high burner for 5-6 hours = modern art

I'm not judging you for almost starting a fire, I'm judging you for having a useless teapot! Very very different!

I strongly dislike whistling teakettles. But I have also never ever left a kettle on the burner and forgotten it. Usually when I put water on for tea, I'm waiting impatiently for it to boil so I can have some damn tea.

Full disc: I normally smoke while I drink tea, so really I'm waiting for the tea to brew so I can take it outside and have a damn cigarette.

i'm judging the way dan is judging

;_;

no no no

i am judging nabisco in the same manner and for the same reasons you are. i am not judging you.

yeah it's not first time stuff like this has happened, lately she forgot her keys but left them inside the flat, meaning it wasn't locked and free for anyone to just walk in. we live off the street but still. this defies belief to me, how can you leave your flat in the morning without your keys?

not flat related but same flatmate forgot her bankcard on her way back home to Ireland a few weeks back when I was unemployed and phoned me to ask if I could bring it to a station otherwise she'd have missed her flight, which I did.

the only issue is when you bring it up you feel almost embarassed at pointing out someone's repeated fucking amnesia.

"hi just to point out once again you have forgotten something pretty fucking serious"

I don't know, there's absent-minded and then there's "hmm, maybe this is a symptom of something else". She might want to go to a doctor and/or review her diet if she's THAT forgetful.

Que: ^_^

i have a SERIOUS oven/iron/burner anxiety problem that got so bad last summer i actually got off a subway halfway through the trip, turned around and returned to my apartment just to make sure i turned off the oven, which of course i had

Dudes if you have a problem with the teapot you are not judging me, you are judging my sainted mother and I will not have that

Zowee Max that is indeed serious

x-post ^ I have done very similar things. I am completely paranoid about leaving things on that I ALWAYS check and usually 2x at that.

Ronan - if she's that forgetful make her buy an iron with a timer that shuts off after a certain amount of time. I thought most had those anyway now tbh.

I once went back to work 2 hours after leaving because I was sure I had forgotten to turn off the coffeepot. It was actually a good thing I did because I had left it on!! I think that's where my paranoia comes from.

xp tp max: I don't know, we wouldn't be saying it was a serious problem if he had returned to find the oven STILL ON, would we?

I once had a neighbor call me from another city where he went for a job interview, and ask me to break into his apt via the fire escape and turn off the burner, b/c he left AN EGG BOILING on the stove and went to Philly. I am not shitting you. The egg was dead, the pot was dead, the apt at least was not on fire.

xpost to ENBB maybe you DID turn it off but then while you were gone the coffeemaker turned itself on. . .!!!!!

you guys know appliances can do that, right???

I agree Dan, just again, creates this weird line between flatmate and like close friend or something, I don't really know well enough to say "hey is everything okay" or whatever, but bringing up the stuff all the time means I know it's odd behaviour. she seems perfectly stable mentally but maybe it's a diet thing, she eats quite small amounts.

x-post yeah like lots of others here I get that anxiety about leaving stuff on too, though these days I seldom forget to turn them off. I used to do it a bit when I was a child/teen at home.

A friend of same flatmate left a gas ring burning in the house. Like how fucking demented do you have to be to cook something and when it's done not turn off the gas ring. Luckily was only on for 15 mins or so from him leaving the place to me returning.

Que stop it. They can not!

The major hazard I always see or hear about now is people who come home super-drunk, decide they really need food, and then somehow pass out or forget before they finish cooking

Christmas Eve '02 drank 1/2 a bottle of chartreuse and then decided to settle in for a Tombstone Pizza before passing out. I imagine myself dying from carbon monoxide poisoning if I hadn't woken up. My parents arrived later that morning. Scary, scary shit.

Apartment smelled like smoke for weeks.

i finally broke down and created a system when i started to get anxious about like whether or not i had locked the door

x-post

OK yeah I did the drunk cooking thing once too.

I left some pasta boiling on the stove and passed out on the couch. I woke up to the burning smell and a pot of black chargrilled pasta stuck to the bottom of the ruined pot. I'm just glad I woke up.

I think it's perfectly okay to have the "hey are you all right because it seems like you are hell-bent on absent-mindedly destroying the house and everything in it" conversation.

(I also am thankful that I'd stopped getting blackout-while-doing-something-dumb drunk by the time I had access to a kitchen.)

not drunk, but: left a crock pot on over night because i thought that they magically wouldn't burn things even after 8 hours

Yeah Dan but I don't want to have to have a personal discussion of someone whom I don't know too well's current mental state as a result of this. She's moving out in a month or so anyway.

If there's still a flat to move out of in a month.

Yeah exactly. Ground zero. It makes me lol a bit I have to say, was telling my Dad today and he was hilarious. "Your granny wouldn't fucking do that and she's blind!" and also "Dick Mackessy wouldn't do that!". Apparently Dick Mackessy is some dude he grew up with in the South of Ireland who was the village idiot, cited by Dad for last 40 years or so probably.

not sure why I capped south there, just felt Right

lol

Sometime in the next month this roommate will start running the water in the bathtub and then leave for a 45-minute run.

i have a non whistling tea pot - i got it from the dollar store - its pretty cute

one time i returned home to find a dish had fallen off the rack landing perfectly on the toaster oven plunger - it had been on for a long time and was smoking and the wall was all black and looked like it was abt to explode - i freaked and grabbed the toaster w/my jacket sleeves ruining my jacket and saving the house

one time i was staying at a friends house and we smelled smoke looked in the oven and her roommate had put leftover pizza AND THE PIZZA BOX in the oven to warm it up forgot abt it and left the house - one of the dumbest things i ever witnessed def

being forgetful & absent-minded is not the same thing as being dumb

putting a pizza box in the oven is dumb fyi

i have done most of the things on this thread at one time or another, and live w/the perpetual suspicion that i am doing one of them right now

xxxp In any case, it might be the same as being "dead" or "homeless" if you haven't worked out some coping strategies/workarounds by adulthood.

And Greg P, if you're reading this, you know I love you but you know not to do this stuff, right?

come on lex, tell us your greatest hits...

i agree being forgetful is not dumb but i also agree pizza box in oven is extremely dumb. why not a plate. the paper would start to burn or wilt or stick to the pizza...

there's a huge difference between, say, melting something plastic in a microwave and putting paper in the oven IMO (mostly because I have done the former)

i'm extremely absent minded, but i've never beaten my bro, who flooded one of our bathrooms, the upstairs landing and downstairs hall by running a bath and then playing Playstation and completely forgetting about it. This was about 3 days before he was moving out my parents house.

being forgetful isnt dumb exactly but the unwillingness or inability to maintain mindfulness can be functionally v similar

friend of same flatmate left a gas ring burning in the house. Like how fucking demented do you have to be to cook something and when it's done not turn off the gas ring. Luckily was only on for 15 mins or so from him leaving the place to me returning.

― Local Garda, Thursday, 28 May 2009 19:24 (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol I've done this, but only once. not good. left the coffee pot on a few times too (that's no biggie tho is it?)

leaving an iron on, against a wall, is massive tho, yeah

have often been going somewhere and thought oh no I've left something on and just figured meh fuck it let it burn

being forgetful & absent-minded is not the same thing as being dumb

it feels like it tho - im EXTREMELY forgetful - when i moved to nyc i had all my stuff shipped/moved professionally except for a few small things of value and then w/e i would need to have on hand so i had to fly w/ only two duffel bags and my regualr msngr bag. i took a cab from the airport to my place grabbed my stuff got upstairs and realized that i had left my bag w/ my cell phone, my wallet, my dayplanner in the back of the cab ~~~ ended up frantically trying to explain the women who shared the floor w/ me that i was not crazy and get her to let me use her phone to call the cab co.

i forget shit all the time basically - even tho i constantly double check things idk i leave the apt w/o my wallet like one a month forget my metro card all the time. first job i had i would forget my security pass so much the guards would just automatically buzz me in. its really frustrating tbh

Yeah maybe I shd be more sympathetic. I said to a friend of mine recently, "It seems like it would be really frustrating to be you" which is maybe not very nicely phrased but she understood what I meant. Our being very diff people w different priorities is probably hugely an offshoot of the fact that she can't remember where she's put ANYTHING or whether she's done something or not, or if she has her keys in her purse, or a hundred other things. OTOH she's far more easy-going than I am as a result.

my most recent was coming back to the UK last week - went thru security at atlanta, had put shoes/laptop/pocket stuff in the little tray things - gathered everything up once thru the detector and walked off, got the train to the terminal, got myself coffee & magazines, settled down to poke the internet until the plane boarded, realised that i'd just LEFT MY LAPTOP IN THE TRAY AT SECURITY.

before that - when i go running i hate my keys rattling in my pocket, so thought i'd leave them in the postbox and collect them on the way into the flat. had not accounted for the postbox being inside the flat.

plus assorted locking self out of flat, leaving shit on (am pretty good w/dangerous stuff like irons and ovens though) blah blah blah

one of the top-5 tensions in my relationship is that i am hell of absent minded and ari is not at all

haha recently i thought i had left my keys somewhere and was abt to call a friend to see if i left them at her house when i realized i was already inside my building

I keep opening the front door and then leaving my keys in the lock and closing the door behind me. I don't think it matters much where I live now but I did this in my last apt which was a huge bldg filled with strangers. That time though some v nice person slipped a note under the front door that said "Your keys are in the door" which saved me 30 mins of frantically searching the apt.

i have a weird spastic thing i do too whenever i am getting on/off a train/car/elevator/office/house where i have to check all my pockets to make sure i have my wallet/phone/keys

haha last month i was really stressed getting ready for a party ran out last minute to pick something up from the bodega down the street and ended up standing in my buildings foyer randomly buzzing my neighbors to let me up when my party guests arrived

xxxpost: last gf and i lived 2gether after the 3rd time i started a load of laundry and then left it sitting there for days she agreed we could use a laundry service. 2 this day i think she still believes i was doing it on purpose to get out of doing chores

when i was like 9, i was on holiday w/parents in poland, and as we were packing to leave i realised i couldn't find my toy penguin that i carried everywhere, and the coach to the airport had to be delayed while we turned the room upside down looking for her, and after 45 minutes of this i realised she was in my pocket

have also done this as an adult many times, except not with the penguin

last week i got up to go to the bathroom. when i got there i looked in the mirror and decided to have a shave. then i left the bathroom and went back to my xbox. then i remembered that i went to the bathroom to have a shower and that i had to go out soon.

i also frequently leave doors open when I leave premises. Not fully open, but ajar, which is kind of stupid.

I keep my wallet in my front pocket because when I kept it in the backpocket i wouldn't notice it so much and would leave it places.

I tried to give all the important things a designated place in my bag so that I always know where to put them/where to check but I keep forgetting what the designated places are.

i have a weird spastic thing i do too whenever i am getting on/off a train/car/elevator/office/house where i have to check all my pockets to make sure i have my wallet/phone/keys

― rip dom passantino 3/5/09 never forget (max), Thursday, May 28, 2009 3:14 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i do this too but i keep them all in my right front pocket so alls it takes is a little pat - its prob a good habit imo - i never leave these things anywhere

I locked myself out of the condo once, but that was mostly due to tricking myself rather than absent-mindedness:

I was wrapping presents using this tape-dispensing contraption about the same size and shape as the automatic opener for our car. I needed to run down to the front door to get something; I went out our front door, checked my pocket by tapping the outside and felt what I thought was the car opener, so I closed the door to our place, thinking I had my keys. I went downstairs, grabbed whatever I was looking for, then went upstairs and pulled the tape dispenser out of my pocket and stared at it, wondering why it wasn't my keys.

That sucked, esp. since I'd locked my cell phone inside the condo.

aaah yeah, the whole thing of walking into a room really purposefully and then literally having to stand there for 5 minutes while i remember where/why/what/who

xxp yup. gotta ass-pat for the wallet, front pocket-pat for the keys. my apt. door auto-locks and that's already fucked me over once.

My car got towed last month so I had to go all the way across town to the towing place and shell out $$$ to get it back. I didn't realize until I got there that I had neither my wallet (ie. license/money) or the damn car keys. I had go all the way back and get them. It was hellish. I think that being upset also contributed to that incident though.

And I felt like such an idiot. Um, can I have my car back pls? Sure I just need to see your license and some $$. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Oh shit.

Flatmates taking stuff off, do you mention it?

i have a weird spastic thing i do too whenever i am getting on/off a train/car/elevator/office/house where i have to check all my pockets to make sure i have my wallet/phone/keys

do this exact thing but as ice cr?m says I always use same pocket and so I never lose these things. have never lost a key in my life. I hate losing stuff and am really careful about it. Earlier this year on my birthday I was out in a club and really out of my mind, and I thought I'd lost my key. I figured I had dropped as I was falling around the place a bit.

After scouring the floor of the club and getting really pissed off about it I got home and my flatmate reminded me I'd given it to a friend of his who had to use our internet so she could lock up afterwards. Was so delighted, like my insane drunken mantra of "It has to be here, I never lose keys" was vindicated. Sort of.

my cousin actually did leave a candle burning and burnt her apartment building ... at least her apartment. She was traumatized by this for several years at least.

I've started keeping a checklist to make sure I have turned off everything before I leave.

my husband has this incredible memory for almost everything EXCEPT for where he puts stuff. i, otoh, have a shit memory for almost everything except remembering where HE'S put stuff. the last few months i've been trying to 'train' him to put his keys/sunnies/wallet on the bookshelf inside our front door, i.e. if i notice he hasn't put them there i make a big drama out of it. it hasn't really been all that successful.

when i was a kid my best friend's mother left her (very old and apparently faulty) electric blanket on all night and forgot to turn it off before leaving for work. she got a ph call later that afternoon to let her know half her house had burned down.

my ex, who was a chef, would always forget to turn the burners off when cooking at home - just because he was used to working over a stove that's on all night.

I'm pretty forgetful so Ive had to develop a hard-wired routine to prevent keys left behind etc. I put my keys in a specific spot every day and keep my wallet in my bag at all times, that kind of thing.

I've never left any stoves or irons on though.

Fact: tea kettles don't whistle when the spout is left open. Instead, they spray boiling water all over your kitchen counter.

To correct my huge forgetfulness, i say keysmoneyphone to myself whenever i leave the house. But then if i'm intentionally leaving my phone behind to charge or whatever i get sort of stuck because one of the three is missing but i can't quite work out what. The current oven turns off at the wall as well as having the burner knobs: since i make coffee on the hob in the mornings I find myself needing to check that everything's off before i leave the house about once a week? And very rarely needing to turn back when i've left the house-- but, god, that sick feeling of panic when you think you've left something on.

A housemate I had two years ago used to leave the burner on, and the pan on the burner, and wooden utensils in the pan (ok he did this maybe three times), and kind of gasp and get apologetic when i knocked and said 'uh you left it on again' but it never stopped him (and he never replaced the wooden spoons he burnt). He was a kind of 'cook and forget about it' guy - he used to leave the hob filthy and i don't think he noticed it, he'd do his washing up and not think to wipe down the hob/tabletop - but I never felt like I could stop him and say 'okay you are unsanitary and dangerous and kind of coasting on the fact that i'm super nervy about the kitchen'.

i have a SERIOUS oven/iron/burner anxiety problem that got so bad last summer i actually got off a subway halfway through the trip, turned around and returned to my apartment just to make sure i turned off the oven, which of course i had

Oh thank god I am not the only person to have done this. I then spent the next week fretting that this meant I had obsessive-compulsive disorder.

That said, it did follow shortly after this incident in this thread, so maybe I was justified:

Accidentally burning the office down, C or D?

i guess living on your own it can be worse as there's no-one to notice the stuff you forgott. luckily the worst thing i've done this year so far is just fail to close the fridge door properly a couple of times so it's ajar all night.

Haha there are at least two Mike Skinner lyrics about this whole phenomenon.

I think the scary thing about this is the combination of really mundane things that you do without really thinking about it and fire/heat/electricity. I'm not normally that absent-minded but I do have my appalling moments, usually while hungover.

The worst example I can remember was on Monday at Glastonbury a couple of years ago, when I packed up my tent in the howling wind and pissing rain and then managed to walk off to the bus pick-up point having left my tent sitting there packed up on the grass. Considering how wet I got packing it up I could have just left it there and sheltered in it for 20mins.

i want to know max's "system"

probably the most elaborate saga of forgetfulness in my life involved me taking the train from glasgow back home to london. halfway to london i realized i'd left my keys on my friend's dresser. in glasgow. my girlfriend had another set - but she was in new york.

as i realized what i had done i could feel glasgow, and my keys, vanishing behind me at approx 90 mph. i frantically called my friends up there and they said yep, your keys are here, what do you want us to do? put them in the post i say. special delivery. what address should we send them to? they say. MY HOUSE OF COURSE i almost yell but then i realize - if they post them to my house, my keys will be inside but i won't! so i give them a friend's address.

i get home w/suitcase and try to get in somehow. no chance. i've locked the deadbolt as well.

then i remember that the woman two doors down, sue, an old maid and a loner with a meticulously maintained morris minor and a pretty serious gardening hobby, occasionally hope over the fences of the back gardens in order to fuss a little with MY garden (which she does because she loves to - who were we to complain?) .. maybe she can think of something. i knock on her door, she's there, and long story short, we manage to chip away all the putty holding my back window in, i climb through, and i'm in.

although to leave and enter the house i had to climb over two garden fences and come through sue's place, because my front door deadbolt was still locked.

three days pass. the keys still haven't come. i've stocked up on groceries. finally i call my girlfriend in new york and shamefacedly explain everything. she puts her keys in a fedex envelope and they arrive the next morning (while my own set are floating around somewhere still, in the mysterious space between london and glasgow).

the fedex man knocks on the door but of course i can't open the door to let him in. my desk is pushed in front of my front windows, so i stand up on it and open the window. "over here" i say. "i'll sign for it over here. those are my keys."

hope hops

if they post them to my house, my keys will be inside but i won't!

also if dodgy postie nicks your keys he knows exactly where to go!

Never post a set of keys to your own flat.

I live on my own. Knowing a lockout has the potential to cost £100 plus new keys/locks is sufficient motivation to make sure I don't do that; before I always knew ways to bust into my own flat if the lock's just the Yale. If I'm unsure about a double-lock I always go back and check, and I've been known to go back from half a journey to get my phone.

Tracer, A++++++ story! Still giggling.

my original 'system' was to cut out a bunch of squares of paper and list all the things that needed to be turned off--burners, oven, iron, hair straightener, whatever--then go through the (small) apt right before i left, check everything, make check marks on the paper, and then keep the paper in my wallet so when i freaked i could look at it.

that lasted about a week and was sufficient to take most of the edge off. for a while i put up a checklist on the door that just had all those same things, but didnt take a piece of paper with me. now i mostly just remember.

that sounds totally mental huh

No, actually, that sounds like a really smart weaning strategy for yourself when you have mental tendencies that you want to break. Did you just think it up, or get it from somewhere else?

max, that is similar to what I do.

did each thing to check get its own square of paper?

no it was like:

__ stove

__ oven

__ iron

etc. all on one piece of small paper. i actually printed up a word doc for it and then cut it into fours.

i like the hopefulness of believing you might actually be using the iron often enough to worry about it

the hair straightener on the other hand i was using every morning

probably the most elaborate saga of forgetfulness in my life involved me taking the train from glasgow back home to london. halfway to london i realized i'd left my keys on my friend's dresser. in glasgow.

I just rememembered I did this once, leaving my keys at a bf's house in Torquay and not realising til almost back in Melb (a 2 hour trip by train and bus).

He very nicely offered to jump on his motorbike and ride all the way back to Melb to give me them (I lived alone so it was that or a v expensive locksmith).

Waiting outside my block of flats for hours in the dark wasnt the best of fun :/

I left my computer on last night, by mistake. Should I mention it to myself or not?

In a few months I'm about to let out my flat,which I am currently spending a stupid amount of money refurbishing, to strangers.

I am pretending this thread does not exist.

(Although I'm pretty OCD and I've left the gas ring on once)