technology gone awry

The tv dinner.

It's beauty lies in it's simplicity. This should be obvious to everyone. Apparently, it is not.

Tonight's Healthy Choice feast required seven- count them- SEVEN steps prior to consumption. Just configuring the box properly was like trying to play Jenga while intoxicated. First you open it, (left side only!!) making sure not to disrupt the integrity of the reinsertion tab. Then you fold the top back and insert the tab (or curse if you ripped the damned tab off). This reveals the super-crust-inducing, titanium coated "heat shield 4000." Place the meal directly on the heat shield 4000 and roll back the Radiation Deflector to fully cover your dinner. You may now nuke the dinner.

And you think it's over, right? You think they've humiliated your intelligence enough over this. Now you push the little "3 minute" button and the "start" button and assume that everything is fine.

But the game's not over yet! As the dinner is whirring around in the microwave you notice, to your complete horror, that you have only completed 5 steps in the preparation process. 5?!?! But there were 7 on the box! Bloody hell!

You go to check the garbage can for the box... but it's not in there! It's whizzing around your microwave, taunting you with the remaining two directions. What could they be... WHAT COULD THEY BE?!?!?!

Clearly, you can't stop the cooking process. You don't want to destroy all your hard work! So you press your face up to the microwave window, despite your recent email forward informing you that this causes immediate retina cancer, and try like hell to read those spinning directions.

"Remove plastic and stir after 1 minute, thirty?!? Mother fu... It's nearly been 1 minute, fourty-five! Goddamned hoity-toity frozen pieces of..."

Okay. Okay. Deep breath. You can do this. What's next?

"Caution: Product will be hot"

"Now that's not even a goddamned instruction! That's a warning! Couldn't they atleast make it a different fucking font?!?! This better be tasty, you Healthy Choice scoundrels."

And it was. I'll give them that. But honestly, with the intellectual marathon it took me to figure out the directions, I could have found a way to spontaneously generate baby ducks from toothpicks and pinesol and make my own foie gras.