Our microwave is fabulous.
It’s a Sharp Carousel and is 1200 watts of pure energy (per unit of time I should add, strictly speaking, as it’s an SI unit of power). It must be over ten years old now, and it looks it as it’s an old fashioned faded cream colour.
The only problem is the information screen you can see in the top right hand corner. It got dropped during our renovations several years ago and the screen broke, so now you can’t read anything on it. Of course, 90% of the time, you just want to nuke something at full power for a short period of time, so you just type in how many seconds you want and press go. (Although even then, if someone’s taken their food out before you and not cleared the timer, you can get a nasty molten surprise). The tricky part is if you want it to perform some more complicated action. You can see from the other buttons that there’s a whole range of clever things it can do – defrost, rewarm, sensor cook your specific type of food – if only you knew what questions it was asking you. Some buttons you press, and it just does its thing, no problem. But other times, it sits there, patently waiting for some further input. Is it a weight it wants? Or how much power you want it to use? No idea. If you’re in an optimistic mood, you can guess at what’s wanted, and most of the time it works fine, surprisingly. But occasionally, you will suffer for taking such a foolish risk. Nothing’s actually caught fire so far, but I’ve had plenty of food rendered inedible in that dried out, solid concrete way that microwaves do best.
So why not just bite the bullet and replace it? It’s complicated. Partly, it seems such a waste. It’s just a tiny screen right? Also, modern microwaves seem uniformly gutless, and who has a spare ten seconds to heat up your warm milk? But most of all, that random factor adds a real spice to the act of food preparation. It’s like gambling in the kitchen.