I have a hellish schedule today — a big committee meeting I have to chair, a student presentation, and then I have to scamper downtown and get a haircut (there goes all my strength) — and so naturally I needed to fortify myself with a hot cup of tea. I walked down the hall to fill up my electric kettle at the office tap, dum-dee-dum-dum, and when it filled, I looked down and…
I’m looking down on the opening of my grayish-black kettle, and there in the middle, it’s THE BLOB! It looked like some awful pale gray clotted slime, and I thought for a moment about what kind of contaminant was accumulating in our plumbing.
But of course you’ve already figured out what it is.
It’s just ice — apparently the cooler was supercooling the water below its freezing point and it was instantly crystallizing when it hit the kettle. I was actually able to reach in and make a slushy snowball with it.
It’s too bad that what I then did was take it to my office and heat it to boiling.
You knucklehead! That’s the toilet!
“Fancy a cuppa? One lump or two?”
Your building has a system that cools tap water to below freezing? That’s absurd.
Says something for the cleanliness and smoothness of the tap and its pipe that the supercooled water survives until it reaches your kettle, I suppose.
Ok, who let the shoggoth make tea?