Queen of the Spatula Killers

Poor spatulas. The last couple days have seen some tragic plastic cookware deaths at my hands. The first time it happened, I was cooking a hamburger on the gas stove in our apartment, using my roomie Amanda's hefty, solid spatula. The burger was cooking slowly, so I put the spatula down and went over to the other side of the room to do something else. I was jolted a few minutes later by the sound of the smoke alarm going off, and as I ran back to the stove through the clouds of smoke filling our apartment, the first thing I saw was that the plastic spatula was on fire! As I grabbed the flaming spatula and doused it under the sink, I saw that the top half of the plastic end was gone. Whirling back to the stove and turning the gas off, I suddenly noticed the other half of the spatula top beginning to solidify onto the edge of the pan. I managed to pry most of it off, but there's still a little bit of plastic stuck permanently onto the pan.
You would think that this would teach me to watch my spatulas at all times while cooking, but unfortunately that lesson didn't save me from maiming another spatula, this time at my grandparents' house. I was frying up falafel balls, and I needed something to turn them over with, so I was using a wooden spoon and a plastic spatula together to do the job. There was a small amount of white stuff floating at one end of the pan, which thoroughly confused me, so I poked at it with the spatula. More white stuff floated off, this time from the end of the spatula, and as I lifted the spatula up, I was horrified to find that the end of it was melting off into the oil in the pan! I ran it under water right away, but while this re-solidified the end, it also thoroughly embedded black bits of gunk into it. So...I'm beginning to think that I should never cook with plastic implements, lest my bad luck continue. I'm cooking dinner again tomorrow night, so we'll see what happens! :)