I swear this was an actual conversation:
My wife: The refrigerator is a bad refrigerator. We hate it. We’re going to replace it.
Me: No, the refrigerator is a good refrigerator. We love it because it’s so wonderful and we want to keep it forever.
The conversation was, naturally, held within earshot of the refrigerator. That’s why we were talking like that. Appliances are notoriously incapable of understanding linguistic complexity. If you want to be sure a kitchen appliance fully comprehends what you are saying, it’s best to speak to it as you would a child or a dog.
Our conversation arose spontaneously; we hadn’t planned it in advance at all. We just naturally fell into the dynamic of good cop/bad cop. My wife took the role of bad cop, implicitly threatening the fridge that if it did not begin performing better — that is, if the ice maker did not start working the way we wanted it to — we would kick it to the curb.
I played good cop. You can catch more ice makers with honey than vinegar, was my thinking.
We laughed at what we were doing, and then we forgot all about it.
But the refrigerator? Apparently, it did not forget.
A few days later, we had some friends over for dinner. One went to the fridge and got more ice for her drink. The cubes plunked into her glass exactly the way they are supposed to.
We were shocked. We were stunned. The ice maker had not worked properly for a year. It did its primary job of making ice, yes, but it only dispensed it as crushed ice. If we wanted cubes, we had to open the freezer door, pull out a drawer and reach in for ice cubes.
When we did that, we invariably spilled half a dozen cubes or more onto the floor, where each one shattered into many pieces.
It was not the worst problem a person could have, but it certainly qualified as a minor inconvenience — especially the part about having to bend over to pick up all the shards of ice that, if left on the floor, would become a slipping hazard.
So we lightheartedly threatened the refrigerator. And the refrigerator heard. The refrigerator understood. The refrigerator changed its ways.
Perhaps it saw what happened to the wall oven.
About a year ago, I broke the wall oven. I did it by trying to use the self-clean option to clean it.
You’d think ovens with a self-clean option would be able to clean themselves without breaking. But that is why you are not in charge of the Planned Obsolescence Department of the Thermador Corporation.
At Thermador — and apparently many or all of the other major appliance companies — the self-clean option on older models gets the oven so hot that the computer board burns out, or melts, or something.
Computer boards are relatively easy to replace, of course, but only if they are still being made. The boards for our wall oven are no longer being made. Neither are the boards for any of your appliances if they are more than a few years old.
I don’t cook as much as I used to, sigh, and I have an oven in my range, so I usually don’t need to use the wall oven. But it comes in handy every once in a while, such as when we have a few friends over for dinner and we’re also baking a carrot cake for an unrelated farewell party at the same time.
So we got a new wall oven. It has more features than we could ever use, or would even want to use. But it also has a few that make my eyes sparkle.
Like the bread-proofing feature. And the air sous vide. And the steam baking. And the steam roasting.
I love my new wall oven. I think maybe it’s time I mention that to my stove.
