When I got my first apartment, I went through the standard right of passage for a lower-middle class girl. I filled that first, crappy one bedroom apartment with second hand crap. I had the standard lumpy futon that is only slightly more comfortable than sleeping on a bed of broken glass. I had a utensil drawer filled with sporks and all my fine china came from the Dale Earnhardt collectors edition from KFC. I even had a set of pots and pans that came with the warning ‘Do not expose to direct flame’.
Of all these broken items that I owned, nothing was so broken down as my second-hand microwave.
You never realize how much you need a microwave until you don’t have one. Luckily for me, at the time, I knew a guy who was getting married. I assume as a part of the prenup his bride demanded he get rid of all his junk. He offered me his microwave.
I was leery. I didn’t really know him that well and it seemed odd that he would just give it away. “What’s wrong with it?”
“The only button that works is the potato button.”
In case you’re part of my massive Amish audience and you’ve never seen a microwave, they all come with standard preset buttons. They have ‘defrost’, they have ‘popcorn’ and they have ‘potato’. You press the button and it goes to the perfect preset time you need to burn your food.
On this particular microwave, the circuit board behind the buttons had shorted out, and the only button that worked was the potato button. I accepted it gratefully, assuming it would be awesome if I wanted a baked potato.
For anything else, I was forced to develop the potato timetable. If I wanted to cook anything, I had to convert it into potatoes first. At first it was hard. I wound up with a lot of burned food and my apartment seemed to permanently take on that disgusting, acrid, burnt popcorn smell. But over time, I became an expert.
I could convert everything to potatoes almost instantly.
“I need to reheat this pot roast.”
“Set it for 4 potatoes.”
“What should I set it for four servings of instant oatmeal?”
“Two potatoes.”
“I need to defrost this turkey.”
“47 potatoes.”
For anything that came in under a potato, I would just set it on top, press the button, and allow the small radiation leak to gradually cook it. I once absent-mindedly set a loaf of bread on top and it toasted every slice of bread in the package.
I clawed my way up from the lower-middle class many years ago and I was able to get a microwave that didn’t require the potato timetable. But to this day, I still have to stop myself from hitting the potato button when I’m cooking something.
It’s amazing how adaptable the human mind is. It’s been nearly 983,082 potatoes since I got rid of that microwave and I still know how to use it.
