Duh!

We recently redid our kitchen and got some spankin' new appliances. The thing that I was most excited about was the new microwave/microhood. It has a "sixth sense." This means it can sense the steam coming off food and lengthen or shorten cooking times until your dish is perfectly thawed or cooked or softened (Whirlpool has some extremely cool engineers on its payroll). It was icing on the cake for me to be able to FINALLY get rid of the microwave sitting on the countertop and free up some more space for chopping, drying, or in my case, piles. The old microwave we were using was purchased by D prior to his freshman year of college, was like 50 watts, and had seen better days. Needless to say, I didn't mind selling it at the garage sale we had last spring for, oh, 10 dollars or so (I thought I came out on the better end of the bargain).

Last night as I put in some frozen corn in my glorious new microwave, I got an error code after I typed in the "sixth-sense" cooking function. Odd. So I tried again with the same outcome. What!?! My glorious microwave was letting me down. I reluctantly set the microwave to cook for 5 minutes and resigned myself to the fact the corn might not be perfectly done. To add insult to injury, when my 5 minutes were up the corn was still frozen. The microwave was letting me down. It seemed like a personal attack. How dare the microwave throw a temper-tantrum like this! As I grumbled around the kitchen, D reminisced that the old microwave, despite its 12 year age and 40 dollar pricetag had never let us down like this.

I nervously called the Whirlpool dudes this afternoon to get some help. After waiting on the phone for 20 minutes, I was finally connected to a representative. After I double-checked my name, address, and model number, I started my dissatisfied rant about the microwave not cooking. The representative patiently waited till I was done complaining and asked me if I had flipped the circuit breaker on or off. "No, I haven't tried that," I said and promptly went to the breaker box and flipped the kitchen switch. . . . .CRAP, my phone was connected to the same breaker and I hung up on the lady. Duh, could you be more dense? I called Whirlpool back up, and while I was on hold did the only smart thing of the day. I tried to heat up a cup of water. Wouldn't you know it? The rebooting seemed to work. My water was boiling in 1 minute 20 seconds.

The moral of the story is: think before you flip, and sometimes you are really lucky when you don't deserve to be.