Find the Smoking Toaster

First and foremost, a big sloppy wet welcome to my 9th follower, Jessica! Hola Hessica! One person closer to double digits. Feels good.

Anyway, if there was a theme for this week it would be....fire. Why? Indulge me to explain.

I was toasting an English muffin in our toaster oven on Monday when I suddenly noticed smoke building inside. Not inside our house, but inside the toaster. It had only been going for a few seconds, but still I turned the timer to 0. I was disappointed, as I hadn't anything else to eat for breakfast and I was already running late. I peered inside to see if a random crumb was on the heater bars when I noticed something that looked like burnt cheese on them instead. I suddenly recalled Joe saying he heated up some pizza the other night and assumed some of it's cheese had dripped off without his noticing.

I considered just going to work without breakfast, but worried I'd get into trouble with food the rest of the day. Quick side note: I heard someone use an old adage that said, "Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper." It does make sense as a diet plan, sort of. If you are full in the morning you are less likely to overeat the rest of the day. However, when I think of eating alot in the morning my mind goes to making things like eggs and bacon; surely not what dietitians had in mind. So then what constitutes a big meal? A really big bagel? Two bowls of oatmeal? It's almost an oxymoron: eat alot of not alot. The only way I could reason in my head was by having a small bowl of cereal with a bread of some kind. Not sure if I'm getting any fitter, but I do find my mealtimes require less binge-eating.

Anyway, back to my toaster and English muffin. I didn't want it barely touched by heat, but I also didn't want to waste it. In the end, I popped it back in for a shorter amount of time and just watched. Sure enough, within a few seconds, the thing started smoking again. I waited as long as I thought safe and then turned it back off again. It had just crossed the not-toasted to toasted line, albeit barely. I slathered on some butter and peanut butter and made do. For the rest of the day I would get a dry charcoal taste in my mouth that reminded me of hamburgers. Not really a pleasant taste at 9:45 a.m.

The next day I opted instead to just buy a bagel from the kiosk in our office library. The guy behind the counter asked if I wanted him to heat it up for me.

"No thanks," I said. "I'll just pop it in the toaster oven in our office."

Back in our communal kitchen I broke the two halves apart and set them in the toaster. While I was getting some water I looked back and noticed the same exact smoke starting to billow. Although I was surprised at the odds of two toasters in my life starting to smoke, I was more panicked at getting in trouble with my co-workers. I could see the forwarded CC message now...

"To whoever was the dumbass who set fire to the kitchen: Can you go ahead and NOT do that? We here at ******* appreciate an unburnt kitchen but don't appreciate irresponsible temps using bagels as charcoal briquettes."

I quickly stopped the timer again, and waited till the smoke had seeped and slipped out before pulling out my, once again, barely heated breakfast bread.

Finally, today, as I decided to neither use my own toaster nor test the toaster in our office kitchen, I stopped at your favorite neighborhood McDonalds for my breakfast. A few hours later as I sat at my computer desk we were suddenly overcome by piercing buzzes and flashing lights. An unexpected fire drill was sounding, and as we all listlessly gathered our belongings and dared each other to take off for the rest of the day, I couldn't help but imagine some poor schlep was inside trying desperately to put out the flames of their Toaster Strudel.

I'm off to a wedding tomorrow night, folks, so have a good one! See you back on Monday!