Pan-o-Rama

This guy, let’s call him Jack, shares my kitchen in the residence hall. He, and eighteen others, but they’re irrelevant here except that they steal my cooking oil and pepper, and sometimes yogurt. This one is solely about Jack.

Jack has a permanent three-day beard and has hair about four inches long on his head. This hair seems to have been taking a hike the day they discovered gravity, so it pays no attention to that minor detail, and does its own thing. Jack, being kind hearted, does not want to force his hair to do anything it does not want to, so Jack’s head looks like a nuclear disaster just out of bed at all given times, even on campus.

Living in a free country means you can let your hair do what it wants, and it also means that you can buy any sized frying pan that you want. These two things are not related, but these are the two USPs of my friend Jack. Accident or a temporary loss of all sense of proportion has landed Jack with a frying pan that is big enough for him to have a bubble bath in. Of course I concede that in case of someone stealing all the utensils of all the kitchen members, we could one day need to make slop for twenty people’s supper in one gigantic utensil, but I am amazed that Jack actually planned for it. Until such a situation arises, we just have to bear with the Teflon coated bathtub occupying ninety percent of the hob, while we wait with our puny blue saucepans for Jack to finish frying his animals for brunch.

If that was it, it would still be ok. But Jack of the nuked hair complicates the situation further. He forgets that after use, the pan needs to be washed. The oil that was used for frying cannot be wished away. Unless the thieving cleaning lady has mercy on him and rinses out that frying pan once a month, it just keeps getting archaeological layers of oil accumulated on it. It would not be a surprised if granny pig’s remains are still in the pan when junior pig is being fried.

Now this leads to the smell problem, which is a big problem in a building without air circulation. It is a bigger problem if you want to cook at the same time as Jack. It is an even bigger problem when you run out of the kitchen with your food as soon as it is cooked and try to eat it in your room, and realize that your sweater has absorbed fumes from Jack’s pan. The problem blows out of all reasonable proportion when you take off your sweater and realize that the smell has seeped into your shirt!

Basically, I had lunch in my vest today because of crazy-haired, bathtub-panned Jack!