The Pat Hatter Buys a Microwave

(This week's recap of Better Call Saul will be delayed; I watch it with my wife and she's been working late this week, so we haven't gotten around to it)

The other day, my wife was trying to heat up some butter for garlic bread in the microwave. The microwave began to make an odd sound and there was even some weird smoke-like gas (possibly smoke) emanating from the machine. She stopped it immediately and became resigned to the fact that the microwave was probably cooked (heh).

While my wife may have skipped straight to Acceptance, I don't grieve over broken things in quite that fashion. I enjoy the Denial stage and spend a disproportionately large amount of time in the Anger stage. Usually I replace Bargaining and Depression with Have-A-Beer-And-Forget-About-It, but unfortunately this is still Lent. Point is, I approached the microwave again for some reason and tried once more to heat up the butter. Surely that was a one-off electrical error that wouldn't repeat itself, and hey look! It started up fine again!

::microwave flickers and pops angrily, cut to scene of entire town losing power and blacking out::

Oh.

When you have a 1-year old and are in a situation where both parents work, a microwave is simply not something you can do without. It is the reheater of easy leftovers, the cooker of frozen vegetables, the source of at least part of damn near every meal for my daughter. The microwave is a holy, sacred appliance that makes life do-able.

"I didn't have enough respect for that power and it's out now." ~ Ellie Sattler, Jurassic Park

I had a naive and simple plan on Monday evening. I would pick up my daughter from day care around 5:00, take her to Home Depot to purchase a microwave, get the microwave up and running in time to heat her up some food, and still wind up putting her to bed at a reasonable time.  It is remarkable just how perfectly every step of that would have had to work out for it to be anything resembling a success, but I convinced myself that things would go in accordance with this schedule.

I am a stupid person.

I picked up my daughter and we made the drive to Home Depot. At this time I realized that I had done little research on the matter in advance. Because I am a millenial and had an upcoming problem involving a physical object, I did what people of this generation usually do and called my parents for advice.  My mom answered and I was relieved to learn that microwaves are simple machines with few complications or necessary specifications. She did, however, remind me that I needed to measure the nook that our microwave sits in before buying one. Shit. I was meaning to do that all day and forgot. I took a detour and headed home to get the measurements: 2 feet wide, 17 inches high, and about 2 feet deep.

When I got to Home Depot, I made haste for the appliance section, understanding my daughter's general level of patience for sitting in a shopping cart for an extended period of time. I looked at the microwaves on display in the appliance section that were hanging above the stoves.  What the hell? These things are all humongous!

Eventually I got to talk to someone that explained that the microwaves on display were "over-the-range" microwaves and that the countertop models were smaller.  Well great, guy! Show me some of those! He takes me over to some sitting on shelves, and I explain the dimensions of the space to him. He tells me that all of the ones on display here should be fine, and sure enough, a tape measure confirmed that. I obviously have no clue what to buy besides wanting stainless steel for the look. There's this one Magic Chef microwave that seemed pretty cheap and another LG microwave that had a better look to it, but was about $50 more expensive.

This is where the power of branding comes into play. I have no history with purchasing products from LG. They might make great products with excellent customer service, or they might make crap that breaks down immediately and outsource their customer service to Comcast. What I do know is that "LG" is the name of a company I've heard of before and "Magic Chef" is most likely a company run out of a basement somewhere that sells its goods on infomercials at three o'clock in the morning, because it is called "Magic Chef". I took pictures of both microwaves and sent them to my wife, but she didn't respond so I just picked the LG one and moved on.

At the checkout register, they rang up the microwave for a price of $179.99. I was about to put in my chip card but I stopped and recalled that this was far in excess of the price on the tag back in the appliance section. I mentioned to the checker that I recalled it being priced closer to $150.  We tracked down the guy that was helping me make the decision and he went to investigate the situation.

Meanwhile, my daughter had been a little antsy during this trip, but no worse than that. Overall, she had been great, and now I had a little down time to play with her a little bit and get her smiling and laughing. The checker was absolutely loving this, and she joined in on the fun. She would tilt her head to the side and my daughter would do the same in reaction while cracking up like it was the funniest game in the world. Eventually, enough time had passed for her to determine that her co-worker had probably reached the Iowa state border by now and would not be returning. She told me that he was "probably going to honor it anyway", so she rang it up for $149.00 because I told her that I thought it was close to $150 but couldn't remember with 100% certainty.  This was a nice gesture.

I then went to the car to text my wife that I had finished the errand. It was at that point that I noticed the picture of the microwave I sent to her earlier. The price tag was in the picture and it was $159.00.

Oh no.

In the grand scheme of things, this was pretty much not a big deal given that I basically told them what price I wanted to be charged and they gave it to me without even checking things out. I thought momentarily about driving away, but I then thought about my Catholic guilt screaming "YOU STOLE $10.00 FROM HOME DEPOT YOU ASSHOLE!!!" at me the rest of the evening.  I walked back in with my daughter and explained to the checker what happened, basically asking her to put $10.00 more on my card.  She said she could not do that and that I would have to take the receipt to the "Returns" line on the other side of the Home Depot.

Okay then.

I head down there and there's one dude in line in front of me. Whatever he's working through with the person behind the counter is taking forever, and I keep making eye contact with the returns person to see if she could squeeze me in during some down time, but to no avail. Meanwhile, my daughter is again the star of the show, smiling and charming everyone waiting around the counter.  This could have been an awful errand and she was making it somehow fun. Eventually, the guy left. I began to explain to the customer service lady what had happened and she said "oh, they called and told me about you. You're good." Neat. You couldn't have just said that to me ten minutes ago?

Finally I take the thing home.  It's 6:45 PM already so all hopes of my daughter getting to bed anywhere close to her 7:15 - 7:30 bedtime are pretty much out the window. Hopefully, though, I could plug in the microwave and get her something hot to eat. When I took it out of the box, it measured at about 21.5 inches wide, so it should fit within the 24-inch wide front of the nook with some wiggle room. Then, I started reading the manual regarding installation. Everything was going swimmingly until I read...

Free air flow around the oven is important. Allow at least 4 inches of space at the top, sides, and back of the oven for proper ventilation.

You have got to be kidding me.

Four inches on each side?

After all that, I don't even have space for this thing??

I immediately called Home Depot back, irate at the fact that the person helping me to pick out a microwave did not care to mention anything about ventilation constraints, while simultaneously stressed that I still was making no progress in getting my progressively impatient 1-year-old any closer to fed, bathed, and put to bed. The kitchen department gave me a response roughly akin to, "Our department employees don't know anything about microwaves." Super!

A part of me began to hope that the four inches thing was just a boilerplate overly conservative instruction put in the manual to cover the manufacturer's ass. I pushed further with the kitchen department and I was transferred to some sort of interior designer over the phone (please do not ask me how the internal phone tree of Home Depot works). I asked this new person whether the instruction was merely a sick joke and she replied that in her capacity as an interior designer that she takes that specific four-inch ventilation specification very seriously when assisting clients with the layout of appliances in the kitchen. At this point, I was losing my mind and having already explained the situation with my daughter to her, pretty much all sense of personal decency had vacated me.

"HOW ARE THE STORE EMPLOYEES NOT EDUCATED ABOUT NECESSARY AIR FLOW REQUIREMENTS OF MICROWAVES WHEN THEY ARE PHYSICALLY THE PEOPLE IN THE STORE TELLING YOU WHAT TO BUY!?!??!?!?!?!!!!11!1!1!!!1!!!"

(I was so out of my mind that I may have actually spoken the "1"s.)

I was told that a store manager would call me back later. In the meantime, my mother-in-law came over and looked at the situation as well. While 24-inches was the clearance for the nook, past the front the width was more like 25.5 inches, so we actually had about two inches of air flow space on each side, half the ventilation requirements shown in the manual. Our family works with a contractor we trust, so she called this gentleman and his point of view was that two inches on each side should be perfectly adequate. Finally having some level of assurance that I'd purchased a product that could actually be used without overheating, I began to breathe a sigh of relief.

All that's left to do is plug the thing in.

The outlet where the plug needs to go is actually behind a drawer below the nook. As this area is otherwise inaccessible, the previous owners drilled a hole into the bottom of the nook so that the plug for the old microwave could pass through it. We tried to pass the new plug through the hole and ran into a little bit of a problem:

OLD PLUG STYLE: STRAIGHT

NEW PLUG STYLE: BENDY-SIDEWAYS-LIKE

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