In the Heat of the Moment

I bought a new toaster yesterday.

This might seem unremarkable, until one considers that I had already bought a toaster when I moved into my apartment, and this original toaster functions as well now as it did when I bought it, then.

That first toaster seemed like a canny purchase at the time. It was a Sunbeam – a well-known brand – in good condition, with pleasant lines and clean, unmarked white plastic in which the controls sat well. I bought it second-hand, from a chap whose new 4-slice stainless steel appliance seemed to justify the sale of his 2-slice model for the low low sum of $5. Ever wary, I asked to plug my prospective toaster in, and inspected it critically as it heated. No smoke, no smells, no sparks; good.

Heating, though, is only a portion of what a toaster has to do. It also, at some point, has to stop.

Stopping is what my old toaster doesn’t do. Like a demented Duracell bunny intent on producing charcoal it keeps going, and going, and going. This is… sub-optimal – but for the sake of $5 I wasn’t going to chase the seller down and demand a refund. Besides – I didn’t toast that often; when I did, I could just monitor the bread and halt the process manually, right?

I could, and I did. And it was irritating. And sometimes I forgot, and would be prompted only by the smell of smoke, and would stand over the sink scraping black particles off my toast until it was edible again. Edible, but cold.

When I went to the supermarket, I would inspect the toasters on offer there. Not the best of appliances, certainly, but ones, I imagined, that would be able to stop, as well as start. The cheapest was $15, and often I paused on my path to (more often than not) the chocolate aisle, pondering: was it worth the price? It never seemed like it. $15, just to automate pressing the “stop” button? Monitoring my toaster wasn’t really that big a deal, was it? And I could do a lot with $15 – buy 15 chocolate bars, for example. Never mind that I’d do so anyway…

So I never upgraded my toaster. I explained to guests that they need watch their toast, but they’d forget, and we’d chuckle; “Oh, I did tell you!”  The first time, we’d chuckle. Later, not so much.

I asked an engineer about fixing it: more trouble that it’s worth, he said. Just buy a new one – but I couldn’t.

Yesterday, I bought a toaster. It cost me $7 dollars, on special. It’s a beastly, ugly thing, with small, mean buttons and flimsy components. It has no features I desire beyond being able to heat and stop independently; no high lift feature, bun warming rack, or slice centring. It could well be from the 1970s, this new toaster of mine.

I was in the supermarket again today, buying cream and beer. (Don’t ask.) Another toaster was on special: burnished aluminium, fully featured, $17.50 – down from $35. I picked it up. I put it down. I walked away. I came back. I stood there for minutes.

In the end I bought a kettle.