Last week I got an unsightly first-degree burn on my right arm. When I first noticed it, I had no idea where it came from. It first looked like a big red welt on my arm, swollen and red, but with unusually sharp edges -- I didn't even realize that it was actually a burn although a few days later it started to look more like one. I noticed it the day I went to Disneyland and I thought, "What the heck caused that?" It seemed to have come out of nowhere and without cause. I spent the whole week puzzling over its origin. Yesterday I had my physical and my doctor touched it and the skin peeled a little, so I knew for sure it was a burn. But she was stumped too. I joked that I must've been abducted by aliens in the middle of the night.
Then this morning I got up and carried my laptop and held it in my right arm and after ten minutes I noticed I had a red mark similar in shape (with well-defined edges corresponding to the raised edge of my laptop) but at a different angle. That's when I realized that my laptop had burned me. This wasn't a burn however; the mark quickly faded. Tonight I was talking about it with my mom over the phone and I remarked at how the angle this morning was wrong. So I positioned the laptop the right way so that the laptop fit the burn perfectly. But this didn't make sense. That part of the laptop wasn't anywhere near the air vents and in fact it felt very cool. So how could I have gotten burned there? Then it hit me. That is where the DVD player was. And in fact, the day before I noticed the burn, I played a DVD while holding the laptop exactly that way. Why was I doing that? It happened while I was on the flight from San Francisco to L.A. on Southwest Airlines. I was cramped up in my seat and to pass the time, I watched a DVD I had burned on my laptop. The most convenient way to view it was simply by holding my laptop the way I did with my right hand. I suppose I could have pulled down the tray from the seat in front of me, but I didn't do that. And so I held the laptop that way -- which is not what I would normally do -- for much of the duration of the flight. And it was a short flight. It must've been only a half hour that I held the laptop that way. But that was enough to burn me.
And this is the weird and scary thing -- I didn't realize at the time that I was being burned. There was no pain whatsoever....it was a gradual burn. I have gotten burns from touching a hot stove or steam or other painful things, but not from something that didn't hurt at all. I guess it is more like getting a sunburn. I can easily imagine someone falling asleep on the sofa with a laptop on him or her and getting a burn. So it is good to know that this can happen, and those of you with laptops can get yourself burned by simply holding a laptop for a half hour with the DVD player running.