Of stoves and rocket science

This will give you an idea of just how pathetic Sue and I are.

We've both been pretty sick with the flu. Sue's having a heck of a time shaking it. She was driving home from work last night and said for some reason she was craving beef. Red meat. So I go out and get a steak for us. And I fire up the broiler on this great stove we've got (well, I think it's great because it's gas; finally, I have a gas stove to cook on.) And the steak is doing great and I'm just sort of standing there and I see this lever on the oven door and I think to myself, hey, what's this do?--so I push it to the right. It's the lock for the self-cleaning oven. Never in my life have I had a self-cleaning oven. Sue and I, as she says, are styling. So, I push the lever to the right, which locks the door. What I don't know is it locks the oven door for keeps. With our steak still cooking inside.

Sue and I have no idea what to do. So we finally called her mom who we knew has a self-cleaning stove; she has all that stuff. And she told us to shut the oven off and as soon as the oven cooled it would unlock itself.

Who the heck would know that?

Isn't there a scene in the movie The Grapes of Wrath where the kids flush a toilet and when it makes all that whooshing sound they think they've broken it and run away? That's how I felt last night.

Sue and I are so out of it we don't have the basic knowledge other people have of simple household kitchen appliances. And I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. At one point I owned a house and I needed a sump pump and I was researching sump pumps and it was pissing me off, because I didn't think anyone needed to know that much about sump pumps or take that much of their time or grey matter with sump pumps. I kind of feel the same way about stoves.

Should something like a stove be so complicated that you don't intuitively know how to use it? Who are we? What have we come? Where are we going?

Sue did say that that might be the last time I say, hey, what's this thing do? But I don't think it will be. I'm one of those cats who's always curious.