I’m in the kitchen with a couple burners going on the stove and a robot blasting music and the comforting company of all my devices humming quietly to themselves, like good children who can play by themselves, when suddenly there is a boop boop. Sort of like a microwave telling me it was done or a timer going off or any of a number of possible electronic communications, but not one I recognized. Huh!
A minute later, boop boop. Smoke alarm? Nah. We don’t have one of those in the kitchen. We’d be slapping it all day long.
boop boop. Absolutely no triangulating the thing. I turned off the music and swiveled quietly waiting for the next boop boop, like a small chewy person in a jungle with a tiger rustling. It was like a horror movie: the call was coming from inside the oven. I followed my standard protocol. That is, I decided it was probably nothing and I’d never hear it again, probably.
Because boop boop only happens when something’s wrong. Batteries running down, some vital electronic nutrient in short supply, an imminent detonation. Nothing in my kitchen does the double-boop when it’s happy.
boop boop. Then: BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP
I noticed my oven was now attempting to communicate with me, some sort of script crawling across the face of the control panel, and after wiping off a year’s worth of spatter, it said: REMOVE PROBE REMOVE PROBE REMOVE PROBE
Remove what-now?
My oven has never taken that tone with me before and I’m a little miffed that its first bleat is a complaint of some kind. Furthermore, I think this oven is at least thirty years old, before there was much booping, so I’m wondering if it had a future-oven chip stuck in it, and also if it knows who’s going to win the third race in Hialeah?
Also too, what probe? What the hell is a probe? DID ALIENS VISIT MY OVEN? Because I could totally forgive the oven for asking for a probe removal if that was the case. I would too.
Evidently, this oven may have come with a meat probe. One end of it goes into a hole in your oven and the other end into your meat, so it won’t get away. I have no memory of such an item and never had a problem with runaway meat. If I had a probe in there I’d be happy to remove it.
I looked up Oven Probe. It looks just like the sort of thing you find in a drawer somewhere when you’re on a Stuff Purge, but you stare at it for a while, and finally put it right back in the drawer, because you don’t know what it does and what kind of trouble you’d be in if you need it some day and you’ve thrown it out. I have lots of things like that and I’m pretty sure they talk about me as soon as I shut the drawer.
In any case no such thing is actually in my oven, and so I don’t know how I would go about removing it. Unless my oven is so advanced it has an empathy chip and is asking me to please remove a probe from something else altogether, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand it might be handy to have all my devices communicating with each other; maybe they can form a committee to keep my printer working. On the other hand, I have to sleep sometime, and I might not know what they’re up to.
In the olden days you could keep them plugged into the wall so they wouldn’t get away. With wifi, they could be anywhere.
Well… so don’t keep us in suspense! Did you find out what the oven was talking about? (A sentence I never would have thought to utter.) Did the booping finally stop, or has it driven you so insane that you’re curled up under the bed in the fetal position? Have the other appliances and electronics joined in solidarity with the oven with their rallying cries of BOOOOOP? Inquiring minds want to know!
Oh god! Like smoke alarms that go off like a flock of birds when the cat shows up? Thank goodness no!
Gotta scoot pronto, but here’s my prediction: a chip has gone out, and no amount of inserting (then removing) a non-found probe will/would have fixed the booping. And, my smoke alarms DO talk to each other, and if one is in distress, they’re ALL going to scream about it! Best my appliances remain ignorant of each other.
It could be my oven is just a solo asshole.
So…you left out the end of this story. You solved the booping? You’re getting a new oven? You’re finally going to find and remove that probe from both the junk drawer AND Portland? You’re not going to tell us just to see who’s paying attention? It’s that last one, isn’t it?
I did not solve the booping. But it quit and it hasn’t come back. It wants to be a smoke alarm, yelling SPIDER SPIDER SPIDER! I am disappointed in a way. If it kept going, I was going to take that as my signal to replace it with an induction range.
But your standard protocol worked! 🙂
Thank god it wasn’t the car alarm going off.
I once was so livid about what I thought was a car alarm going off endlessly that I grabbed my husband’s baseball bat to hunt down this car and give it something to complain about. Then I heard it coming from our local reservoir. Nothing a baseball bat could do about THAT.
Wait…wait…
Our thingsI communicate with our neighbor’s refrigerator when we walk into the kitchen with our devices. We get to choose whether we want to use their server or ours.
Well gee, I borrow my neighbor’s internet when mine goes out, but I didn’t even know refrigerators could converse.
Mimanderly, when you reply at 3 am, what time is it at your home?
You definitely read for detail!
Well, Murr’s blog is set to west coast time. I’m in the east cost. So that would be 7am. I’m an early riser… but not THAT early!
Six. Six am.
Does indeed sound like mimimanderly lives in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.
Yeah, probably closer to 6am. I’m an early riser, and like to have my morning tea while checking out the internet. It’s my “me” time before Paul and our parrots get up.
My family had a Pinto, the rear end collision exploding car, not the horse, but I suppose a horse’s ass could and probably does explode given the right circumstances.
Anyway, the Pinto was one of the earlier cars that could detect whether the seat belt was engaged and if it wasn’t, the car would refuse to start. My family was good about following rules, so buckling the seat belt wasn’t a huge issue.
One very cold winter’s day I went out to the car at the end of work, buckled my seat belt and it refused to start. It also made the usual very loud annoying sound to indicate the seat belt wasn’t buckled. Tried various things and got the same response. Also colder and desperate because my coworkers had left and this was decades before cell phones.
So I reached under the seat, saw that there were two wires under it. Same deal on the passenger side seat. When I yanked them out, the siren ended and the car started.
I didn’t tell anyone because I knew what my engineer father’s response would be. It took some amount of time until he noticed and announced happily that the seat belt alarm had failed.
Idiotically I took credit. He then began to worry that this might cause a malfunction or it might be an issue for going through inspection. And he rewired it.
I hope you learned your lesson.
Nope. Even when I didn’t take credit the finger pointed at me.
Loved the line: “..looks just like the sort of thing you find in a drawer somewhere when you’re on a Stuff Purge, but you stare at it for a while, and finally put it right back in the drawer, because you don’t know what it does…” Been there, done that!! Lots of brackets and such in the garage like that too. Plus, probably a dozen of those special doohinkies that you get with Ikea furniture…just in case.
I have an entire box of those. Allen wrenches right up the ass. (They’re small.)
I loved your disquisition on preventing the escape of meat. Brava!
You want food that can’t get away. So, no okra.
Sometimes a few of the inmates escape, as when I bite into a tomato and the seeds spray across the room.
Yeah, I sometimes long for an old fashioned, totally-mechanical gas range. Our fancy dual-fuel Kitchen Aid stove will occasionally (and erratically) decide that it won’t let us stop baking by merely hitting the ‘off’ button. When that happens, James has to humor the thing by hitting a bunch of keystrokes on the touchpad so that the oven thinks it is being programmed to bake for just one minute. After it times out, it meekly shuts itself off. And if I accidentally hit the touchpad area with too much Spray-Way Glass Cleaner? Well, then we get incoherent error messages until the thing decides it has dried out enough…..Heck, give me a kitchen appliance with more steel and cast iron than brains, and I’ll be happy. In the old days, the worst thing that could happen was that the standing pilot lights would go out. Even at 10 years old, I knew that if the kitchen smelled of mercaptan it meant to open a door or window and go relight the pilots….
….and speaking of electronic witchery……your gol’darn website has decided to make me “anonymous” once again. I guess somebody went through an ‘update’, huh?
When we have unidentifiable BOOPs or BEEPs it’s usually because one of us didn’t shut the fridge all the way. Right now we have actual crickets screeching that sound like something electronic except there is nothing I can do to stop them. They get on my last nerve!