An Airbnb guest shared her nightmare online after accidentally melting the bottom of a kettle when she placed it on top of a lit stove to try and heat it, despite it being electric.
Electric kettles do not require physical heating using a stove top and instead plug into a wall, but aren't as common in America as other places across the world.
However, actress and performer Bailey McCall did not realize this during her stay in an Airbnb last month. After going to make her coffee, she was left with dripping plastic over the kitchen from melting the owner's kettle.
"So I'm currently staying in an Airbnb and the other day I went to make a French press and when I put the kettle on the stove, I quickly realized that oops, it was an electric kettle," she explained in a video on TikTok with 2.5 million views, adding a "cooking fail" hashtag to the caption.
In the video, which can be seen here, McCall shows the previously like-new kettle now left with a burnt, melted bottom and the stove with melted plastic dotted all over it.
"Thankfully, I caught it just in time and naturally it sent me into a spiral questioning everything about my life," she joked.
McCall dumped the ruined kettle into the trash but confirmed in an update video that she did replace it, adding that it was "actually the first thing I did after ruining the other one."
In the U.S. stove-top kettles are the norm, where the kettle is filled with water and then manually heated on a stove. The water then boils and creates steam which when fully-boiled, produces a whistle sound.
In other countries however, electric kettles are favored, which see people simply fill a kettle up with water and place it on a base, where it then heats up without any added work.
Reportedly, the use of stove-top kettles in the U.S. instead of electric kettles is due to the difference in voltage in American homes. American homes have far lower voltage than other countries, which means that electric kettles would take a lot longer to successfully heat the water.
McCall's "careless mistake" cost her $84.99 and serious slack online, as viewers rushed to express their shock at her actions.
"I'm just baffled that you took it from the electric base and put it on the stove top," commented one TikTok user.
"This just infuriates me," added another.
"I'm hoping this is satire and you didn't do that," commented one user.
Update 6/30/22, 3:58 a.m. EDT: This article was updated with comment, video and photos from Bailey McCall.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
