So its 3.45 am and I’m asleep. Who’d’a thought? And then I’m awake. Because of a bang. Big enough to wake me. And Mel. She ‘heard’ the bang because she was only half asleep from a potty stop 10 minutes earlier. But I didn’t hear it because it was the agent of my awakening, so logically, I wasn’t awake and thus not conscious, at the time of banging. Then I was, suddenly, ‘rewound the tape’ and thought ‘bang!’ We got up, walked into our shower room to find one of the shower doors had simply ‘exploded’. There it was, in its constituent blobs of glass, all over the fucking floor. In the toilet. Over the sinks. Safety glass. Or, not very safe glass. Oh well, never mind, at least we know what the noise was, back to sleep…

Though accelerated heart-rates are not the best aides to slumber, we eventually managed. Never mind, it was only a shower door. So how did it break? Why? The door has no frame, so there’s no stress. Its not, like ‘wedged’ against a wall or in any kind of tightness situation. Its just a fucking door. Or it was.

What if I’d been in the shower? Like, at the time of explosion? What broke the door? Mel told a work colleague who said: ‘oh yeah, that happened to us’. It’s the new pandemic. Exploding shower door syndrome. Wear a mask.

So I googled it. As ya do. And under ‘exploding shower doors’ there’s (obviously) thousands of articles, comments, explanations, support groups, organisations for the rights of shower doors, just tons of it. Because it can happen. Doh. And it does happen. Its a function of toughened glass. Because the way glass is toughened is to cause stress patterns in which the glass is effectively ‘pushing out’ from the inside. So when something hits it, its meeting a force pushing out. But any flaw or penetration and those forces get released, all pushing out together, causing an explosion. And long-term chemical activity in the glass can do it, or any possible movement against a hinge or handle. As the doors are heavy. I know. Even when in a bin bag in crumbly little bits, it still weighs a lot.

I’m just glad we don’t have toughened walls in the house. Or they might explode too.

Be careful out there. Or in here.

A xxxx