Well, if you’ve been anxiously waiting for my first posting, please, make sure you take your meds immediately. Speaking of meds, if you have read this far here’s the legal info: I am not responsible for anything anywhere, don’t come suing me Jack. If you are still reading, note that you will not get your previous 2 minutes back, no refunds. At this point if you’re still here, then I would like to point out that there are fine psychiatric professionals who can probably help you.

 

Ok… still here? Welcome, there’s no hope for you. You may as well read on.

 

This is a place where I intend to bitch. A lot. Loudly. My significant other has stopped listening to it so I figured I’d shoot it out into cyberspace. Quote my five year old: “If Daddy is gonna be this grumpy, he should go back to bed.” I hate it when people make me laugh while I’m mad.

 

I also intend to expose the work of the most evil man on earth, and since no one knows his name I’m calling him: The Design Guy. His workings are insidious, they hit you slowly and from every angle and every where, such that you don’t consciously notice it. But it’s there, like a spray of automatic weapons fire in slow motion. In these posts, I’ll expose him and his evil work so that everyone can see him.

 

Here is a fine example of his work:

 

Like many people I have oven and a microwave in my house. Actually this was My Queen’s house, I moved in here when she decided that she liked me a whole lot. Yep… she’s even more nuts than you, dear reader. One of the early days here, I decided to bake something. I don’t remember what, but that’s not important.

 

Our oven has many buttons on it, compared to the simpler older one I had in my former house which had a dial that you turned to the temperature you wanted the oven to be. On the new one however, it has buttons labeled “Bake”, “Broil” and “Clean” and next to those under “Temp”, up and down arrow buttons.

 

Easy enough huh? I pressed the button labeled “Bake” and upped the temperature to 400 degrees. Unlike women, I actually preheat the oven before I bake, (I’ve never met any women who do this…) So, I went back in the living room and sat down to wait for the oven. My old oven beeped when it hit the temp I wanted so I figured this one does too.

 

Thirty minutes later I remembered I was gonna bake. I figured I just missed the beep or it didn’t beep. I went in the kitchen and noticed two things that stood out. One, the oven was ice cold. Two, the little display of the temperature was off. I thought maybe My Queen turned the oven off so I hollered to her upstairs and asked. She said she didn’t know it was on. Ok, so I press the “Bake” button again and set the temperature to 400 again. And I went back to watching TV again.

 

This time I’m listening for the beep. After 15 minutes and no beep, I see that the oven is still cold and the display is blank. Figuring I’ll be needing to call Sears out to fix it, I walk upstairs to inform My Queen that the oven is broken. She comes downstairs, of course, to see for herself.

 

She presses the “Bake” button, just as I did before. Changes the temperature to 400, as I did twice before. The display reads 400 as before. She presses the “Start” button. What. The. Fuck? Admittedly I didn’t read ALL of the buttons on the panel, as I didn’t want to set the time or delay the start or cook for a specified time. So I paid no heed of the start button. WHY, after pressing two other buttons, do you need to confirm that you did, indeed, mean to actually turn on the damn oven?? This is the work of The Design Guy.

 

The old oven came on with the turn of one dial. The new and “improved” way requires me to press a button, press another button repeatedly (I don’t need any help being obsessive compulsive…) and THEN press another button to confirm that, somehow, you didn’t accidentally press those other buttons!

 

Now, as an evil super villain, The Design Guy has henchmen. Kinda like Fembots. And you’re going to hear them say, “This is a safety feature to keep children from turning the oven on.” Don’t fall for this bullshit, my kid learned how to turn on the oven by the time he was 18 months old, pretty much the day he realized he could reach the “Start” button. This isn’t a safety feature. It’s an annoying feature, as are ALL of The Design Guy’s implementations are.

 

I mentioned the microwave when I started. The reason was that it also has been modified, by The Design Guy, to annoy. I never cook with the microwave. I just don’t like the way things cooked in it taste. However, I do use it extensively to heat and thaw things. Now, when I thaw things, generally I’m doing a lot of other prep work for whatever meal I’m making. Thawing a pound of meat takes 5 minutes at low power in the nuker, generally in two 2 1/2 minute sessions.

 

Unless I’m boiling water, everything else in the way of prep work takes WAY longer than 2 1/2 minutes. So I would like to turn on the nuker, let it run and go about my other business. The problem is: when the nuker is done with it’s 2 1/2 minute cycle, it beeps to let me know it’s done. That’s a good thing, I wanna know it’s done. However, 30 seconds later it beeps again to remind me (the mad cow really hasn’t hit me this bad so far…) that I haven’t retrieved said item from it’s bowels. And, helpfully, it beeps like this EVERY FUCKING 30 SECONDS UNTIL YOU OPEN THE DOOR.

 

Now, I’m pretty well versed in physics, mechanics and mathematics, but I may be wrong here. But I am pretty sure that whatever is in the microwave after it turns off is NOT going to burn. In fact, I would bet that if something burned in the microwave, after it cuts off, the microwave isn’t working properly. So… Why does it cry like a baby needing a bottle after you cook something? I’ll tell you: The Design Guy, because he’s evil.

 

Along those lines, the oven has a cook timer too. It will go off, at it’s alloted time, EXACTLY once. If you don’t hear it, you better hope you cooked something in the nuker at the same time. Otherwise, the next beep you hear will be the smoke alarm. Oh, and beware, the smoke alarm was designed by The Design Guy too. I’ll tell you about that next week.

 

E.W.

 

Ok, after rereading this before I posted I’m really pissed off that an 18 month old could start it the first time and I couldn’t.