Plastic Flavored Pizza is Bad for You

A bit of a disaster today.

Last night, around midnight, I was going to bed. I went to the bathroom right before I did and I noticed my roommate Long in the kitchen. He was setting up a full size pizza to put in the oven. At midnight.

Long has never used a oven before so I told him to make sure to put the pizza on a oven tray before putting it in. Through blurred vision (I wasn't wearing my glasses as I was about to go to bed) I saw him pick up a tray that seemed very similar in size and shape to the oven tray we used the other day. I gave him a nod and went on to the bathroom and then to bed.

This morning me and roommate Rodrigo woke up at 6:30 am to get ready for our 8 am classes. While we were in the kitchen eating breakfast, Rodrigo asked me if I had seen his tray. I told him that I thought Long had used it the night before to cook a pizza in the oven.

Rodrigo froze and I saw his eyes widen.

"That tray was plastic...." he said.

It was about this point that my own eyes widened. Slowly, we opened up the oven to find quite a horrific scene: the plastic tray was ingrained to the top rack of the oven and had melted down all through the thing. Long's pizza was no where to be found.

I'll be honest; we were pretty frantic. For while, we thought we were going to have to pay for a whole new oven. The inside of the thing looked awful. We weren't sure what you had to do to fix something like this.

At this point, we filed a maintenance request and then separated for class. As I left for my busy day, lots of questions filled my head. Why didn't Long wake us up when the tray melted? Where was the pizza... had he actually eaten it? And how much was I going to have to pay to get this fixed?

As the day went by, I made phone calls to my RA and residence life, trying to figure out how to fix all of this. As it turns out, Residence Life wasn't too concerned. They just told us to clean it up ourselves and let them know if there were anymore problems with the oven.

I arrived back at the apartment around 5 to find that Rodrigo had already gotten most of the plastic out of the oven. We still have a little left that hopefully we will get out tomorrow. Shortly after I got home, Long arrived and told us his story. He said that lots of smoke erupted out of the oven when all this happened but, for reasons I still don't understand, he didn't wake us up.

And that pizza.... where did it go? Well, as it turns out, Long had been keeping it in his bathroom. He brought it out to show us. It had one giant bite in it. Yeah, he still tried to eat the thing. He said it tasted pretty bad.

I took some pictures of the aftermath of all of this that you can enjoy below.

Here is Long posing with the destroyed piece of plastic tray (or as he was saying, his "art").

Here is the damn pizza that was responsible for all of this mayhem. Notice the bite Long took out of it.

And here is our oven post all the plastic being taken out of it. As you can see, there's still a little left on the bottom that we need to get out.

So overall, it's been a interesting / stressful / strange day. Lesson learned? Um, yeah. I guess.