The brain makes odd decisions when panicked.
Mine does, anyway. The following will not make you cringe, but did make me question my own thought process...

I was cooking dinner for my housemates before I went out. I had a recipe I wanted to try and various things to use up, including a block of beef dripping. What better medium to fry some pieces of steak in than beef dripping, I thought? So I popped some into the wok to heat up, turned away to tend to another part of the recipe and then approached the wok with slabs of beef at hand.

The moment I popped them in, it was quite apparent that the dripping was hot enough - I was able to make a crude assessment of the temperature as a quantity of it had spat out of the band and distributed itself all over my wrist and forearm*.

As you can probably imagine, this was quite painful, and I'm sure one lonely lobe in my brain was telling me to get that hand under some cold water, pronto. Unfortunately, all the other lobes appeared to be screaming entirely different commands at a generally greater volume. The one that won the shouting match said something along the lines of
"Well, that was a daft thing to do, wasn't it, you great pillock? Anyway, you'll want to run some cold water on that, but - wait, wait...you've got a pan full of hot fat sitting on that hob..."
And my mind's eye recalled those lessons when the fire brigade come to visit your school and explain the horror of chip-pan fires. Despite the fact that my hand was slowly being turned into crow crackling, I returned to the pan and made sure it was steady.
"Well done," chirped my brain, "now you're probably in a lot of pain, it certainly feels like it to me. Because I am you. I should know. But before we go selfishly tending to our wounds...you wanted those bits of steak done rare, if I recall - better turn them, hadn't you?"

I duly turned the steaks, made sure the wok was steady and then finally ran a quick blast of cold water over my arm. Oh, that felt better. Of course, I promptly returned to the wok to toss in the other ingredients and finish off the recipe and serve it before making any proper attempt to cool down my seared flesh. For some reason my brain had decided that my injury was a less pressing issue than the prevention of a kitchen fire (understandable) and making sure the food was cooked properly (a little harder to rationalise).

The most bizarre bit was picking the solidified pools of beef dripping off my arm. In hindsight, I probably should have left them there as I have been left with three or four impressive little scars around my hand and wrist, as a permanent reminder of what a malcoordinated gastropod I am.

*_{I'm no stranger to having warm goo over my wrist and forearm, but it's normally closer to a comfortable 35^oC and hasn't been produced from the carcass of another animal...}
(LongJohnBaldry, Thu 23 Sep 2010, 15:25, Reply)