Microwaves Beware Part 2

So a little while ago I posted Microwaves Beware Part 1 saying that I would be posting Part 2 within a few weeks...and I suppose it HAS been a few weeks...kinda...

Ok, ok.  It's been two months, I know.  Give me a break.  You try studying Chinese and then tell me you have time to answer to every whim of my reading audience.  Do you think Mr. Rogers dropped everything he was doing to please the small children who clung to his show as if it was a religion?

Well...I guess he kind of did...seeing as that was his job.  But you know what I mean.

Anyway, this is yet another story of why I should not be allowed to have microwaves, let alone use them.  And either by a turn of ironic fate, or by the fact that my supervisors read my prior blog about "microwave safety", my roommates and I no longer have a microwave in our dorm room.

I never really thought about that before now, but it's kind of funny either way.  Remind me to write a note to Karma at some point telling her "good game."

So here's the story now.

I was 12 and Little Brother was 10.  It was a boring summer day, and all the cartoons we had wanted to watch were done for the day.  It was about mid afternoon and total summer boredom had set in.

Mom was out in her garden, and dad has just stepped out to set up the sprinkler to help out our front lawn that was suffering from heat stroke.

Little brother and I decided that our toys and video games were boring and that the only thing that would quench our thirst for something to do was the microwave.

We didn’t really make plans of what we wanted to put in there.  All we knew was something was going in there and we were gonna see what happened to it.

I think if there had been a plan at all, it was to put different things in there to watch the different results.  Fortunately for us, and the microwave, we only got through one experiment before our research got shut down.

Our first, and only, test subject was a potato chip.

I don’t know how we landed on the idea of a potato chip, but it was available, and we could reach them in the cabinet.  They would do just fine.

We had enough brains to grab a plate from the cupboard at least.  We put a single potato chip on the plate and placed it in the microwave.

Thankfully for our young, easily distracted minds, this was one of the earlier, not as complicated and advanced microwaves that required a secret, eighty-button code to set the cooking time.

We decided thirty minutes was ample time to conduct our experiment on the potato chip.

Pay attention that I said thirty minutes and not seconds.

Yes.  We’re crazy.  We know.

Five minutes passed and nothing really changed other than the fact that the potato chip browned ever so slightly and the air had a smell of “fresh” potato chips.  The experiment was going smoothly so far.

It was around the ten-minute mark that things started to get moving at a quicker pace.  The chip had turned a dark, charred brown, and the air no longer smelled like fresh potato chip, but overcooked, potentially burning potato chip.

I remember it was also at this point that we began to get a little nervous.  We looked around to make sure mom and dad were still not present and weren’t able to disrupt this effort to make advances in the field of nuclear science.  We continued to push forward with our experiment.

At fifteen minutes, halfway through the originally set time, we knew we’d taken things too far.

The chip was crisp and black, and had in fact begun to ignite in spots.  Somewhere along the way, the plate had begun to fill up with a liquid that we later found out was some sort of grease.  In fact, I’m pretty sure we actually managed to liquefy part of the potato chip.

The air definitely smelled like something was burning, though whether it was a potato chip smell, or burning flesh, was indistinguishable anymore.

We quickly popped open the door to the microwave and grabbed the nearest things we could to put out the ignited potato chip, which just so happened to be the spray bottle of water my mom kept for her plants.  It would have to do.

The smell, that up until that point had been only slight in the air, flowed out of the microwave like water flows through a crack in the Hoover Dam.

Panicking, Little Brother continued to make sure the chip was out by dousing it with water, while I ran to the bathroom to grab the Lysol air freshener.

I ran through the house, releasing a spray of blueberry aerosol through the air generously.  That would cover up the fact that we’d burned a potato chip to indistinguishable proportions right?

Wrong.  As soon as dad came in the house, he smelled the mixture of burning potato chip/flesh and blueberry and became suspicious.

Our nonchalant cartoon watching in the other room didn’t work for a second.

Needless to say, we got in a lot of trouble and weren’t allowed to use the microwave for a long time afterwards.

Also the plate we did this all on had a permanent scorch mark on it.  Mom used it as a constant reminder of our stupidity.

I think she still has it too…

So in conclusion, me + microwaves = doom.  Microwaves had better look out when they see me coming with a food item, or any other item for that matter.