Pop Tarts
Usually I don’t have breakfast until I get to work — I’ve discovered that if I have breakfast at home at 6 AM, I’m just as hungry when I get to work as if I’d had no breakfast. This morning, though, I felt on the verge of a migraine, so when I stopped at the gas station on my way to work, I picked up a diet vanilla Coke and strawberry Pop Tarts. This remined me of an incident a couple years ago with Pop Tarts…
Some mornings when I arrived early to work, I would let myself get Pop Tarts from the vending machine as a treat for breakfast. One such morning, I bought my tarts, brought them back to my office and popped them into the microwave. The instructions recommend microwaving them for 3 seconds. 3 seconds.
This particular morning, I was quite tired. I put the Pop Tarts into the microwave, and then turned to my computer to see what e-mail I needed to attend to. I became engrossed in the e-mail, and after reviewing a couple messages, realized that I still heard the microwave going. It had to be more than the 3 seconds I’d set it for.
I went back to the microwave, and it said it still had a minute and a half. A minute and a half?? Crap. I must have set it for three minutes. So it had been in there for a minute and a half. I stopped the microwave, and opened it up to see what damage there was.
The Pop Tart had contracted to about half it’s normal size, but had also bloated up where the filling was. It was charred black and smoking. I quickly threw it out, burning my finger tips in the process. I noticed that there was a smoggy feeling to the hall going out of my office. I walked down the hall to see how far it went, and found that I could smell it about three doors down from mine.
When a co-worker came in, he popped his head in my office and commented that it smelled a bit smoky in the trailer. Did I smell it? Hee hee hee. I started giggling uncontrollably at that point, and confessed my story.
The trailer smelled of burnt Pop Tart for the next two weeks.