« nashville flooding | Tales From the Carypt »

Microwave

Somewhere along the way, the product engineers at Emerson’s microwave division lost their way. I say this as the unfortunate victim of the user interface of one of their home microwaves.

In recent years, I’ve seen the addition of a neat little feature on microwaves: the “Quick Start” buttons, which can start your food heating for a minute with the push of a single button. Nice, although if you would have told me that I would have a device in my home that can shoot deadly radiation at the push of a single button, I would have hoped for a ray gun of some sort.

Well that neat feature has now taken over the entire interface of my microwave. Instead of having separate 1, 2, or 3 minute “Quick Start” buttons like I used to see, now they’ve combined the function of the standard 1-6 numeric buttons with the quick start functionality. Now, I fancy myself a tech savvy guy, so I figured, “Fine, so if I want to cook something for 20 seconds, I’ll just have to push the Time Cook button first… somewhere here….. must be missing it, check again……….. There’s no time cook button.”

I proceeded to pound on the buttons randomly like a monkey, and finally achieved my goal. So let’s recap:

Old process for cooking something 1 minute:

1. Press 1
2. Press 0
3. Press 0
4. Press Start

New process for cooking something 1 minute:

1. Press 1

Verdict = Win

Old process for cooking something 20 seconds:

1. Press 2
2. Press 0
3. Press Start

New process for cooking something 20 seconds:

1. Press 2
2. Swear because microwave starts up at 2 minutes
3. Press cancel
4. Search for Time Cook button
5. Press random buttons with varying degrees of failure
6. Swear again
7. Realize 5 year old son is standing behind you
8. Convince son not to tell Mommy where he learned that word
9. Stumble upon Power Level button which displays current power level
10. Accidentally bump 2 button and discover that it has switched to taking a time input now
11. Press 0
12. Press Start

Verdict = Fail

Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 12:00 pmand is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Microwave”

1. Missy Says:
   July 8th, 2010 at 2:51 pm

   HAHAHHA! I TOTALLY just realized yesterday that there is no timed cook button!!!

2. Ben Says:
   July 9th, 2010 at 9:03 am

   When will they perfect the voice activated version?

3. Troy Says:
   July 9th, 2010 at 9:31 am

   Not too sure I’d be excited about one of my kitchen appliances that is capable of producing cancer listening in on my conversations. I’d be afraid it would stage a coup the night before a kitchen rehab project.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website