Yikes!

I had that happen with the large bottom shelf of a new refrigerator years ago. I picked it up to wash it and it shattered in my hands. No, I did not bang it, bump it...anything to cause it to happen. I just carried it to the sink and was about to lower it down and it crumpled in my hands.

I was SO glad that it was safety glass else I would have ripped my hands to shreds. I then had the great joy of trying to get all of this glass out of my sink and garbage disposal. :p

I called the manufacturer and reported this. They immediately sent me a replacement shelf, no questions asked. I'm sure that they were just grateful that I wasn't harmed.

Hope that this was just a fluke and not a defect with all of them.

Something similar happened to us several years ago--the glass on our oven door just shattered suddenly, out of nowhere. I hadn't even used the oven in quite a while (that's how much of a cook I am!), and no one had bumped up against it or anything. It just shattered into millions of tiny cubes one day. The real pain of getting it replaced is that that was the year UPS was on strike, and it took _forever_ for it to be delivered. (Not like I was anxiously waiting because I was going to actually use the oven! LOL!)

Another glass story...I make stained glass windows (hence my name), and when my DH and I were still living in an apartment (the one with the shattered oven door), I would set my glass work stuff anywhere there was room. Finally, we bought a house, in large part so I could have a garage workshop to confine my glass stuff to. When DH's running buddies were helping us move, they kept getting stuck with little shards of stained glass hidden in everything...the sofa, the kitchen table, the bookshelves. One of the guys said, "I didn't even think about the possibility of there being shards of glass in the sofa!" And DH and I, who were long accustomed to picking little glass chips and solder balls off of everything, thought that was hilarious. I mean, who doesn't automatically think to watch out for shards of glass in the furniture? haha!

Hope your new patio set is more durable--