Nothing too dramatic, but my partner just moved to the city I live in and I've been helping him set up his apartment. It's been about a month now and we still aren't finished, and it's both of our first time living on our own.

A few weeks ago, his first or second week here, we got hungry while unpacking boxes, so I took over the kitchen and made a pasta I really like (he's had it exactly once and liked it, so we figured it was worth a shot since we didn't have ingredients for anything else). Probably worth noting that I usually have a recipe for this, but know it from memory and realistically don't need the recipe anymore. I did not have the recipe. It's also worth noting that by this point, I had only been in this apartment a handful of times and never looked too hard at the appliances. They're different than what I'm used to. Very different.

So, I go to make the pasta without the recipe and soon, the disasters begin. We had been told by a friend of mine (the previous resident of the apartment) that the stove specifically was "evil." She did not, however, tell us what that meant. So I found out the hard way.

Anything left on one specific burner can and will catch fire in under a minute.

The smoke alarms went off about 3 times while I was cooking because of that burner. Thankfully maintenance was already aware of the issue so we just let them know it was nothing serious and that it might happen again.

After that stopped, things went pretty smoothly! Until the timer for baking.

Once again, I must emphasize that this is a far different setup than what I'm used to- Where his oven shows temperature, mine has a clock. We're cooking midday and I set the temperature to 350, then let it bake.

Until I notice that the "clock" hasn't changed but I've done several tasks. And somehow a single minute hasn't passed. So I stand and stare at the "clock" until he comes in and asks what I'm doing, then very gently explains that no, that is not a clock, it's the temperature I set it to. (Actual time was only 3:55 or so by that point, so it had been 5 minutes since I set it. 350 at 3:50pm)

I just go "oh," because I'm exhausted and have no braincells left. We started at noonish. It takes 3 hours to fully make this pasta.

We both ended up in a fit of giggles when we realized how much of a disaster this had been (other incidents, including him attempting to cook chicken in a very... improvised... way, occurred too; we both had several failures during this process)