Warning! Danger! Who would have known?

The other day I replaced batteries in the clocks in the classrooms at church. They had all started behaving erratically because they had all been put up new on the same day--and that's another story.

But anyway, I went around and replaced batteries and had a couple of extras in my pocket, which I then transferred into my purse pocket.

Yes, not much difference between my jeans pocket and my purse pocket. Except my keys were in my purse pocket.

Last evening at dinner out with our friend, I felt like I was sitting on a hot seat. It felt a bit like the heated seat in our new car. I wondered a bit, found my jacket that I was sitting on to be a bit warm and shifted a bit in the booth.

When we got up to leave and pay our bill, I reached into my purse pocket for my keys.

My pocket was hot. My keys were hot. I fumbled around in the pocket a bit and found:

 

A battery was hot!  Really really hot! So hot that I would not toss it into a trashcan at that time for fear I would start a fire. (I know, you should recycle batteries.) The battery had shorted out--probably against the keychain and heated enough to melt and split the label covering and expose the bare metal casing. 

It's not something that would happen every day, because how often do you toss a couple of batteries in your pocket with your keys? But be careful.