The human body works scarily like any man-made alarm clock when it comes to warning about cold exposure: It has a snooze mode. After raising the alarm, it goes completely silent and that is when it’s all the more dangerous. The stand on my bicycle had broken and I’d fixed the replacement myself. Only, I hadn’t fixed it right, so it was bending away whenever the weight of the bike was transferred onto it. I decided to fix it this evening and since I couldn’t work with the small screw assembly and tools, I took of my gloves and set to work, telling myself that it would be done before the cold could get to my fingers.

After the first couple of minutes, the cold alarm started to go off in the head, so I quickened my work, only, the job was trickier than I’d anticipated. I had to remove the entire stand assembly and put it back again. As the minutes continued to tick away, the cold alarm in the head went silent. I just assumed that the body was heating up my hands more: I couldn’t have been more wrong. After a few more minutes, I noticed that I’d dropped a couple of screws from my bare hands. Worse, I couldn’t feel the remaining screws, even though they were right in my hand! I suddenly dropped the wrench from my other hand and found that upon picking it up, I couldn’t properly grip it! I slapped my hands together and then felt all the cold alarms go off again, this time at full intensity!

I rushed back inside and put my hands under hot water and could feel the water and then the heat, only after about forty seconds or so. I kept the water flowing for a while, dried my hands and pulled on my work mittens, ones which cover the hands and come with a retractable finger cover, and continued working. This time around, I was able to complete the job without any further trauma to the fingers. I learned a valuable lesson today, about avoiding cold exposure, and thankfully, the lesson was only unpleasant and scary, not much worse. Thanks so much, Deepa for recommending the work mittens. They really came in ‘handy’! :) I’ll now always remember to pull them on, every time I want to work with tools in the cold outdoors!