[Sca-cooks] OOP Burned Popcorn

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Dec 9, 2007, at 9:23 PM, rattkitten wrote:

> Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:
>>
>> On a tangential note, what is it about what may be argued to be the
>> fastest cooking utensil in human history, that makes some people
>> compulsively _walk away from it_ while it is working?
>
> Amen Brother!!!!!!!!!  My wife does this... funny thing is, it stops
> cooking it just keeps beeping....

Ours beeps once, then stops. It also beeps, rather quietly, in a range  
that constitutes an auditory blind spot in the hearing of virtually  
everyone on the premises, so unless you're less than six feet away it  
can't be heard.

The timer on the regular gas oven, though, is loud, obnoxious, and  
will go on until the last fossil fuel on earth is burned, we don't pay  
the electric bill, or we turn it off. Whichever comes first.

It's not so much that people set the microwave going and walk away.  
It's the fact that they suddenly, and invariably, as if there's some  
law at work, remember some really urgent appointment. It's the blind,  
inescapable, pre-destined, despairing certainty of it... if it were a  
matter of needing, for some health or other logical imperative, to be  
elsewhere (microwaves are bad for you, and you need to be at least 15  
feet away from a working microwave, say), but nobody seems to be  
working on this line of thinking. It is illogical to the point of  
perversity.

Conversely, these same people can put something in the gas oven and  
stand around like dolts for 25 minutes doing nothing but waiting  
patiently for the item to become hot...

>> Now, obviously when you put a 28-pound turkey in a standard oven, by
>> all means find something to occupy your time. However... microwave
>> popcorn whose instructions generally state that the job will take _up
>> to_ a given time???
>>
>>
> Spew!!!! How the hell did you fit a 28 pound bird into a microwave?   
> Oh
> wait I misread.... Standard Oven... Got it.  I thought you meant
> standard sized microwave oven.... giggle.

Nah, I was just drawing the contrast, so to speak. Obviously the  
things that you expect to take a long time are using blocks of time  
that would be really attractive for busy people with a lot to do. I  
could understand the desire to go off and do X when they're waiting an  
hour or more. It's the blind, fatal, predestined, compulsive, lemming- 
like, free-will-sapping inability to wait a minute and a half, during  
which time the likelihood of a small but dangerous fire is high when  
compared to other processes, that gets me.

>   In our case we simply didn't
> watch him putting the bag in... so it was our fault since it was like
> his second time and I think the First time I "Helped" him so it was  
> his
> first time solo... easy mistake to make when you can't read.

Of course. We helped ours, too. We even talked about listening for the  
pops, etc. It's just that when the child is, for practical purposes,  
30 miles away under a steel-reinforced concrete bunker, s/he cannot  
listen for the pops _or_ the beeper.

Someday I'll look back on all this and burst into tears ;-).

Adamantius