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December 18, 2007
Notes from Ferdy - Exploding Hair Tongs
Bruce has always been concerned about the presence of a live bomb in the steering wheels of modern cars, but it never occurred to him that hair care products had the same potential.
The explosive item in this case was a fuel canister for a gas-powered curling iron. Curling irons use heat to break down the hydrogen bonds that give hair its shape. Depending on the iron's shape, it can make flat hair curl, or curled hair flat. I don't know why it's necessary for curly-haired people to flatten their hair or flat-haired people to curl their hair, but I suspect it's to make up for the fact that you aren't as beautiful as cats.
The gas canisters used to power curling irons are filled with butane, a volatile hydrocarbon that comes with all sorts of safety risks. Like any energy source, that risk is directly proportional to the amount of energy that can be delivered per cubic inch. In this case, the selling point is the ability to heat an iron to 200 degrees almost instantly. Portable canisters that can perform this amazing feat are bought and sold all the time without any problems. This time-- and I can't tell you how it happened-- one of them destroyed a house and put four girls into the hospital.
I would not be surprised to learn that the girls did something expressly forbidden by the instructions in the user manual. This is because nobody reads user manuals any more, and I sympathize. User manuals are chock full of obvious or silly precautions that hide the useful information. For example, in the three pages of safety rules for the electric curling iron Bruce's daughters use, it warns against immersing the thing in water or using it with an extension cord. By the time you get to the really important warning about making sure the metal parts don't get wet, your brain has shut down from the weight of the preceding nonsense.
The important lesson here is that a small mistake with an ordinary household item had a big consequence that's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's the textbook definition of a chaotic system, and we're not talking about climate, or economics, or astrophysics: we're talking about hair care.
In the coming months, there will be a feeding frenzy of attempts to assign blame and extract punitive damages. The frenzy reflects a very human desire to believe that we live in an ordered civilization where catastrophes are preventable. I understand that desire, but it's not realistic in a world where the thermal requirements of 70 hair-styling sessions can be squeezed into a little tube that fits in your palm. And the damage that tube can deliver is nothing compared to what nature can do without our help.
Keep that in mind. Over the course of the next year, there will be a whole lot of politicians talking about what could have been prevented and what should have been anticipated and why we need to have more investigations. It's all nonsense.
The truth is, we can't even be sure of a curling iron.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
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