A cooler mystery you’ll never find
I walked into the office break room morning to discover that the glass door on our drink machine was shattered. No one in the office seems to know what happened to it.
I speculated that the office cleaning crew might have accidentally busted it while cleaning the break room, but later as I thought about it I decided that didn’t make sense. The focus of the break was too high up the door to be from something like a vacuum. The break room’s floor is tile, too, so a vacuum wouldn’t be needed. The “point of impact” shows no penetration: the spot doesn’t show any inward or outward bend. The glass is shattered but the individual pieces are still held in place by the glass’s coating.
I went on with my work today but something in my head was still thinking about the broken glass. On another trip to the break room, I came up with a new explanation. Measuring with a tape measure, I realized the door isn’t square! The glass might have been twisted to its breaking point by the warped door it was in. The spot where it shattered happens to be very near the highest point of stress if the glass had in fact been warped.
Some maintenance workers from the soft drink company will be out to repair it soon. I hope to find out from them if this has happened with other coolers.