On microwaves
Specifically, presettings. Personally, I have never used the setting for popcorn, or to reheat pizza, or even to soften cream cheese. I don’t know if anyone else does, either.
As I sat, in my sleep-deprived state, staring at the microwave in the staff area, I wondered why this is so. If the designers added such functions, one would hope the functions had had some thought put into them, some calculations, so that I could conveniently defrost my frozen vegetables without too much thought. I decided to see the settings that popped up when I told the microwave to soften my cream cheese.
First, I tried pushing the number and label for the cream cheese setting. Nothing happened. Not a button after all. Fine. I pushed the “soften” button above the menu on the control panel. The display now read FOOD. Uh, kay. I pushed it again. No difference. I thought, then to press 2, since that was the cream cheese menu number. This changed the display to read “2”. Helpful. I pushed 2 again, and the microwave beeped, leading me to believe that I had dome something, but the display remained the same. And so I gave up and hit ‘clear’.
Perhaps other microwaves have better designs (I think my grandmother’s has buttons for each presetting), but for this microwave, those presettings are useless. No-one will ever use them, because no-one will have the patience to figure out how to work the menu. Huzzah for extraneous features!
