Curiosity and my obligations as Infrastructure Man often compel me to monitor the electrical usage of various appliances. One such appliance is our microwave oven, already infamous for requiring a superfluous button push before the door can be unlocked. That feature can be disabled, but any interruption in power causes the “feature” to re-enable itself. Still, life got a lot better when we discovered how to turn in off.
While watching our energy monitor, though, I discovered another strange anti-feature of the oven. If I tell it to heat something on high power for, say, two minutes (120 seconds), the oven actually only operates for 110 seconds. Then it turns off its magnetron — the device that generates the microwaves — so that the oven only actually heats for 110 seconds, not the 120 seconds requested. But it lies to you and pretends it is continuing to operate for the full time specified.
Much like the cowls over engine jets in the world of the Marching Morons, this accomplishes nothing except to fool users and perhaps regulators in to feeling better about themselves at the expense of misinforming people who like to pay close attention to things like energy use and how to properly use their microwave oven. People like, say, Infrastructure Man.
I suppose they justify it as a “safety” feature. Of course, it’s not. Lying to people about the power being on for the last ten seconds when it isn’t is not going to save someone from getting burned. If they’re camping out at the oven waiting to open it the second time runs out, they’re just as likely to open the oven before the time expires. And will a ten-second cooldown really make that much difference to someone so hell-bent on getting hot dishes out of the oven the second it beeps?
I suppose the damage caused by the anti-features is minimal, but it galls me that we feel it is okay to have our instruments lie to us because we’re perceived as being too stupid to take care of ourselves. Of course, I’m the kind of curmudgeon that feels the same way about Daylight Saving Time — if it’s really so important to start and get off work an hour earlier, change the work hours, don’t program you clocks to lie to you just so you’ll feel better about it.
—2p