breathtaking idiocy

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Unexpected Microwave

My microwave broke, so I had to buy a new one.

That sentence right there conveys absolutely none of the dismay and panic I felt. Plus, it makes it sound like the microwave just up and expired, all by its lonesome, when really I BROKE IT. I BROKE MY MICROWAVE. DURING A PANDEMIC.

Yesterday, I opened the microwave to remove something I’d heated and THE DOOR BROKE. Right there in my hand. The bottommost panel of the microwave door, right beneath the handel, separated from the rest of the door. And the door would no longer close and also started to feel quite loose on its hinge.

Listen, I am already dealing with an Ongoing Refrigerator Saga, which I will probably tell you about at some point but which causes me TORRENTIAL FRUSTRATION, and I cannot – CANNOT – deal with fiddling around with another appliance. The fridge is too costly to replace (if I even could, during a pandemic, when appliances are in SHORT SUPPLY) and also, it – SO FAR – maintains the minimum functions required of a fridge, like “holding food” and “cooling things” and “producing ice.” This could change at any moment, I recognize, and I am fervently grateful for the second fridge we have downstairs. (Yes, yes, these are Not Problems type of problems, I am aware.)

(Side Vent: In the nine years we have occupied this house, we have bought a new fridge and oven/range, replaced the dishwasher, the washer and dryer, three faucets [kitchen, bathroom, laundry room], a shower head, the water heater, two trees, and a toilet. We should also possibly replace the windows. And now the microwave. And also the fridge sucks and if I had a spare $$$ lying around I would definitely replace that. I am grateful that a) this didn’t happen all at once and b) we had the means to do so without significant financial strain, but OMG is this normal??? I have never owned a house before so maybe gradually replacing everything is just what it means to be a homeowner but it seems like a lot!)

Anyway. Speaking of Not Problems problems. No one needs a microwave. I mean, I guess if you live in a house with no other means of heating your food, then a microwave is a necessity. So I will backtrack and say: I personally do not need a microwave. It is a nicety. A luxury appliance. But nonetheless, I have always been in possession of a microwave and therefore much of my cooking/eating life has been arranged around the fact of a working microwave. For instance, my daughter eats pancakes that I microwave for her almost every morning. (Yes, I could make pancakes from scratch every morning, as Carla and my inner Snarky Pinterest Mom so helpfully and logically pointed out, but I am not going to do that.) We can survive without a microwave. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t have a microwave, after all, and, in fact, would look askance – deeply askance – at me for my microwave dependency. 

And yet I went to my local appliance store this morning, ten minutes before it opened, for the express purpose of buying a new microwave. 

I have heard rumblings about the appliance shortages that have arisen during the pandemic. And let me tell you, this is REAL. Even though it is a random Monday, and even though I had arrived ten minutes early, I was only the fifth or so person inside the store, and the parking lot was filling up behind me. There were no available salespeople on the floor when I went in; they were all talking to customers. So I stood there stupidly, trying to project an air of I Should Be Helped Next as another customer entered the store and made her way to the part of the store where additional staff members were busily not looking at us. 

Near me was a customer looking at dishwashers. “I really recommend you get one of the machines we have in stock here in the store,” the salesperson was telling her apologetically. “Otherwise, it could be at least six to eight weeks before you get yours.” 

I looked toward the checkout area, a long desk at the far end of the showroom behind which are several offices with doorless doorways that open into the showroom itself. I was staring because not a single one of the six or seven people in those offices was wearing a mask. This included two people who were in the showroom, talking on the phone. I had a moment of panic – I should leave, right? How can they not be wearing masks? Have they not heard about the pandemic? But… there was a sign on the door saying masks were required, so… perhaps they don’t understand that staff should wear masks, too?

“… yep, already full and people staring at me,” said the unmasked salesman into the phone, making eye contact with me. Then, as the woman who’d come in behind me made a beeline for him, he hung up and pointed at me. “How can I help you?”

Staying where I was, in the middle of the store, while he put on a mask, I called to him that I needed a new microwave. He made some pretense of showing me the microwave floor models, mumbling all the while that he didn’t think they had any of these ones, or these ones… and then he kind of threw up his hands and said, “crazy, crazy times” and we quickly returned to his computer station where he looked up whether he actually had any microwaves in stock. 

This is where I told him that I’d looked on the store’s website, which had claimed to have a specific GE model in stock. We would take that one, I said. He typed on his keyboard. Then he went into the back to look at what was available.

He returned, shaking his head. “I don’t have any of that model in stock,” he said. “I can sell you one, and order it, but honestly, I have no earthly idea when it will arrive. We aren’t even getting estimates for timeframes anymore. I could do the same with a Whirlpool microwave, but honestly, they’re even worse than GE.”

Was I going to have to go somewhere else to buy a microwave? Would Best Buy or Home Depot have any better selection? I was starting to feel anxious about the possibility – this store is close to my house and has a relationship with a reputable installation service and we’ve used them for ALL our appliances, so I feel comfortable with them. Plus, I like supporting a local company. But now I pictured schlepping all over town trying to find a stupid microwave that wouldn’t take an indefinite amount of time to arrive, being turned away from store after store by harried staff members trying to fight against the desperate crush of appliance-hungry customers. 

“I mean, we probably do have a few options here in the store, but they start getting really expensive.”

Turns out, internet, I would rather go without a microwave than spend $800 on one. I kind of stared at the salesman, thinking about my new, austere, microwave-free lifestyle. Perhaps I would write a book about it. A how-to guide of sorts: MicroWAVE Your Old Food Heating Habits Goodbye. Maybe I would need to buy a toaster oven. Could I really see myself becoming a Toaster Oven Person?

He interpreted my reverie as pleading, and kept typing. I have no idea what he was doing. He could have been making a grocery list. Or writing his own tell-all about the Great Appliance Panic of 2020. Maybe he was journalling. “November 16, 2020: Dear Diary. Another day of people needing new refrigerators. Why have all the refrigerators in the country simultaneously failed? Another day of my colleagues pretending that there is a forcefield separating the air of the offices from the air of the showroom. Another day of customers looking at me as though they can manifest a non-existent appliance through the power of staring.”

Miraculously, through the magic of my unfocused stare, he discovered that he had, in the warehouse, a very basic GE that would work as a replacement for my microwave. “It doesn’t do much more than heat,” he said regretfully. “But there is a button to stop the turntable from turning if you want that.” (Why would I want that? Why would anyone want that? Isn’t giving your leftover soup a spin around the ol’ heat carousel the whole point of a microwave?)

“Great,” I told him, microwave relief flooding me. “I am fine with basic.” I need a microwave that can heat my food and maybe act as a timer, that’s it. What kind of functions are these $800 microwaves performing that are so much better? Setting the table? Complimenting your cooking? Chewing the food for you? Heat the food. Beep when it’s done. That’s all I need from a microwave. 

The salesman gestured to the floor model of the microwave he’d located so I could examine it, check the price, etc. “It’s fine,” I said, giving it a cursory glance to ensure it wasn’t $800 (turns out it was even less than the option I’d scouted online), and handing over my credit card with the barely controlled panic of someone finding the country’s very last Tickle Me Elmo on Christmas Eve during a year when Tickle Me Elmo is the Country’s Hottest Toy. 

“I’m just glad you had something to sell me,” I told him. 

“It’s been utter pandemonium,” he told me. “You should see it in here on Saturdays. It’s like we’re throwing a big party or having the year’s biggest sale. Every. Saturday.”

He shook his head. “And it’s getting even busier, even though the COVID numbers keep rising. And a lot of the people we see? Are real old folks.” Here he pointed over my shoulder at the woman who’d come in behind me. “She’s no spring chicken,” he said. “Well, I’m not either. But you have to wonder, what are they doing?”

He went on: “This pandemic has been so hard on everyone. Well,” he reconsidered. “Not on us. This is our best year ever.” The way he said it – coupled with the purple hollows under his eyes – didn’t really sell me on the “best” part of his sentence. I really hope he and his fellow salespeople get significant bonuses for dealing with all these people clambering over one another to get their grubby paws on the last available electric range, that’s for sure.

He was able to schedule the installation of my new microwave/removal of my old microwave (which means I will have another human in my house later this week, yikes) and took my payment. I didn’t get to take the microwave with me – the installation company will pick it up from the warehouse and bring it to me on Thursday. Frankly, it made me a little uncomfortable to leave without it in my room temperature hands. I kept waiting for someone – No Spring Chicken, perhaps – to swoop in and buy it out from under me. I guess we’ll see, come Thursday, whether I actually bought a microwave or some stainless steel air.

All in all, I was in and out of there in twenty minutes flat. Then I came home and reheated leftovers on the stove for lunch because that is a perfectly reasonable, if more time consuming, way to reheat things. 

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Discoveries

Tonight I needed some butter, so I went downstairs to the basement refrigerator and opened the butter… box? cupboard? drawer? It is a little shelf with a door that slides up. Butter cabinet. In any event, there was NO butter in the place where the butter should go. Instead, I found three (3) blocks of extra sharp cheddar cheese.

(Careful readers will remember that I found myself inexplicably! without! cheese! a few weeks ago. Now we know that was a LIE.)

Who put the cheese in the butter tray(?)? That is the question of the day, and a question we shall never answer because a) if I ask my husband he will definitely NOT remember putting cheese in the butter place even if he did, somehow, decide to move all our cheese to a place where no one would ever look for cheese and b) it is actually pretty unlikely that he would do anything with cheese or rearranging refrigerator contents but c) I have NO MEMORY of relocating the cheese to the butter storage space, nor do I think I would EVER consider the butter pantry a good place for anything Not Butter.

Anyway. The cheese expired in August. I gamely opened and have eaten several slices of the block that expired August 28, which was just days ago, so seems within the realm of eatability. Time will tell. The other two blocks went into the garbage. Goodbye cheese. (For reference, the cheese I bought most recently expires in December, so we have had the butter cubicle cheese for A While.)

Aggressive brightsiding: At least I didn’t, like, FORGET to buy cheese???

Another discovery, equal in importance (near zero) if also in inanity (high):

I have been having Severe Right Foot Pain for about a week. At first, I wrote it off to walking on my tiptoes on the treadmill one day. Probably ill-advised, but it seemed like it was “exercising muscles that often get ignored” and also it had absolutely no effect on my calves, the actual muscle I was trying to “tone.” Also, the pain was just on the right foot; the left foot was unaffected. I tried stretches. Doing a sort of lunge stretch, where the right leg is stretched behind the body and the pressure is on the toes/ball of the right foot, was excruciating. I tried massaging my own foot. Difficult. I tried Advil. I tried Tylenol. I tried whining to my husband. The pain persisted.

I decided to Tough It Out and went for a long walk… but halfway through, I was in so much pain – limping, extravagantly, but with my head held high for any onlookers – that I was strongly considering calling my husband to come pick me up. (Are you shocked that I didn’t even allude to the pain in my post about the walk??? Hence is the carefully curated picture of my life I present to you on this here blog.) I did NOT call him; I don’t think he would have gotten out of his pajamas nor piled our child into the car with all the associated whining for much less than an actual broken bone/gunshot wound, plus pride etc.

The next day, I did a lot of couch sitting, with minimal improvement. 

I started googling, and bravely facing several deeply upsetting and highly (im)probable diagnoses.

At the same time, I was having Severe Right Wrist Pain. It’s not like I’ve been writing a lot, and I have actually been trying to cut back on Being On My Phone. So I couldn’t think of any source of the pain (except google-provided neurological diseases, of course). And the pain was so uncomfortable! One day I was trying to eat soup and I could barely hold the spoon! 

Clearly a degenerative nerve syndrome even google couldn’t diagnose.

Then. Last night. 

I woke up at 4:15 (as is my wont; my brain has an un-reset-able internal alarm set for the three- to four-a.m. range, at which point it does crucial worrying about inevitable future deaths of elderly family members and unresolvable political differences with fellow countrypeople and personal embarrassing moments from my past that really, really should have been wiped from the mainframe by now because they do nothing but harm). I was on my left side (this is relevant I promise). I noticed that a) my hand was lodged under my pillow (hence, under my head), at a 90 degree angle from my wrist and b) my right foot was tucked underneath my left calf, in a position that bent my toes forward at an unnatural angle. Hmmmmmm.

I un-wound my limbs from these positions. I lay in bed “trying to sleep” until six o’clock, at which point my alarm went off, I hit snooze, and promptly fell asleep for the nine minutes the snooze lasted and was incensed when the alarm went off again. (My brain is a dick.) 

Even with a less-than-two-hour break, my wrist and foot feel MAGICALLY BETTER.

(Perhaps this is a red herring; we shall see tomorrow. Although… I am not sure I can sleep without performing these contortions. I lay down on the bed yesterday afternoon while Carla was in her post-school bath and my foot naturally leapt to the weird position, so it must be something I do All The Time. And seriously, what is the DEAL? Am I just… clenching every possible body part and staying that way until morning? And how can I POSSIBLY prevent it if I’m SLEEPING? Sure, if I am wakeful all night, I can monitor the situation. And surely, my brain is ready to leap to wakefulness at any moment just to prevent an instant’s pain! Except when I needed it to do so, last week or whenever this took place! Plus, I don’t know if I want to replace Excruciating Foot/Wrist Pain with even less sleep than I am currently getting of a night????)