Microwave Stories

Today I'd like to share with you two tales involving microwave ovens - one about the perils of this mysterious technology gone awry and one good old-fashioned story about a dumb-ass golfer.

*****

My friend Brad is not stupid. He's a bright guy, and so's his wife Jenny, except female, and I imagine their newborn son Calvin will turn out to be pretty swift in his own right.

In fact, Brad's so bright that he found out how to tell if your microwave leaks radiation, and shared this discovery with me. One day Brad came up from the basement, where he was living, with this funny look on his face, and said, "I think I'm gonna go get a new microwave, man."

"Okay," I said.

"I was just reheating my lunch, and I was standing there waiting for the buzzer to go off when my keys got, like, really hot in my pants pocket. It took me a second to figure out what was going on, but I managed to push the stop button before a hole burned through the cloth." I glanced down at his pants quickly, then back at his face to see if he was kidding.

"So you wanna go or what?" he said.

"Go get a new microwave?"

"Yeah."

So we ran over to the mall and got a new microwave.

I plan on telling this story to Calvin someday, assuming he doesn't sprout antlers or anything in the meantime.

*******

This next story concerns a wealthy golfer who once purchased a small ceramics-glazing business from the mother of a friend of mine.

He was partial to a special kind of golf balls, reputed to cost $20 apiece, due to their special magneto-liquid cores which were supposed to make them fly farther. Now, a guy who'd buy twenty-dollar golf balls is already way up there on the gullibility chart, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that he also believed whoever told him that *microwaving* the balls would make them go even farther.

Cautiously, prudently, he placed one ball on the tray and set the timer for five seconds, just to see what would happen...

No he didn't. This dude crams about three dozen of those suckers, about seven hundred dollars' worth if my math's right, pushes "high" and "thirty minutes" and *walks* *away*. Probably to go practice his swing in the back yard or something.

Well, almost the whole kitchen had to be replaced. Not only did the balls explode, they blew the door off the microwave and ricocheted around the room, splattering goopy metallic smegma all over the $5,000 oven, and the SubZero refrigerator, whose stainless steel doors were riddled with dents from the barrage, and the shattered glass doors on the custom-built cabinets mounted over the marble countertop and the imported tile backsplash. All destroyed.

When his wife came home from shopping or whereever it must have looked like demons had ravaged her kitchen, summoned forth from the dimension of possessed volcano pellets by a confluence of time and space and microwave energy.

"What in the name of Sara Lee were you trying to cook?!" she must have said.

*****

Of course I wasn't there. I have no way of knowing if it's true or not. But I've decided to believe it. And not just because I spent too long standing in front of Brad's microwave.