Recently, I had a craving for microwave popcorn. So, I bought a bunch of the fancy stuff when it was on sale.
Until one day, my microwave oven decided to die a slow death. It would start fine but stop halfway through. I was able to partially reheat my leftover Thai massaman curry crispy duck. I eat most leftover foods cold, but there's something about that sauce that tastes better warm. I restarted the microwave five times to get it lukewarm.
I don't even use the microwave that often, so it felt like an extravagance to spend hundreds of dollars to replace it. I didn't need all the fancy bells and whistles just to reheat some leftovers, maybe defrost something I forgot to, and make my popcorn.
Good luck with that. Nowadays, they are WiFi enabled so black-hat hackers can get in and create a botnet to attack places with. Because why would you care about security protocols on your microwave? For that matter, why do you need WiFi on your microwave, but I digress. To purchase a simpler model without all that nonsense, means I also had to forego LED lighting. In the end it was worth the sacrifice. They're already ridiculously expensive, so I was fine saving a couple hundred dollars to get one without WiFi and LED.
My old one is an over-the-range type, which means I needed help with installation. It turns out some stores offer that. For an additional fee, of course. I gladly paid it and waited excitedly for delivery/installation day to arrive.
On the morning of, I turned the microwave under-lights on to make sure my range-top was clean, and I didn't look like I live in filth. They worked great for half of that cleaning and then they died, too. That old one was completely dead. I turned off the circuit breaker to make sure it wouldn't be a fire hazard.
The two installation men arrived in a large truck and a dolly carrying my giant, heavy microwave inside. The first man took one look at my current configuration and said "UNSAFE!" That oven has been there just fine for close to ten years. They refused to install it though. I started getting teary-eyed because it's so frustrating and intimidating at every step. Why do we make life so complicated and hard for ourselves?
I kept asking him what am I supposed to do? He finally took pity on me and gave me the number of his friend who would do it off the books. Maybe it was a scam, but I kinda didn't care at that point. I could see the finish line and my fucking, goddamned popcorn.
The friend called me about five minutes after they left, and spoke less English than they did, which is saying something. But we settled on a price which included him reinforcing my current situation to bring it up to safety standards.
This mofo showed up a couple hours later and had the reinforcements in within ten minutes. Totally worth the extra money, assuming I don't hear a big crash one night. He had to pull out the stove to do all of this, and there were not only nasty dust-bunnies, (because who pulls out their stove to clean??) but also a dead lizard. So much for not looking like I lived in filth. He very kindly swept that up and threw it away. And I vacuumed the dust-bunnies when he went out to his truck.
Voila! Here is my $450 popcorn. It tasted glorious.
