Week 114: Unlimited* Sports Water

Sunday 23 May 2021

• Switched on the wrong ring on the hob and melted the kitchen scales. In my defence, the hob rings are arranged in a 2x2 layout, but the knobs are in a 1x4 row, which is extremely normal but literally a textbook example of bad interface design. It can be comforting to search Twitter to find other people making the same mistake.

• Actually unrelatedly, bought a microwave oven. Warming up leftovers in a fuddy-duddy oven or saucepan is OK, but space age microwaves are more efficient, maybe? Apparently 93% of UK households have one.

  I don’t know why I did the “click and collect” thing. Declined the offer of help carrying it to my car (I don’t have a car). Then I think I was expecting to carry it all the way home, but the box was bigger and heavier than I’d imagined.

  Like a gift from god, I found an abandoned shopping trolley in a bush, with all of its wheels. But what are the ethics of using a stolen trolley? That’s the trolley problem. Obviously, after wheeling the oven home, I’d have returned it (the trolley) to where came from (the Asda, not the bush). But I didn’t.

  A further present from a higher power, there was a conveniently timed bus that took me some distance. (Maybe my first experience of the alarming vibrations of a Wright StreetLite. Noticed it wasn’t tracking on the Bus Open Data feed for some reason.) I might then have caught a further bus, but for some reason I instead persisted in carrying the heavy item the rest of the way, very slowly and stoppingly. Walked past another wild trolley. Thought one of those for-hire electric scooters would have been handy – I’d not have scooted, just balanced the box on the deck and pushed – but none were around.

  I have no regrets, apart from maybe everything. It’s the simplest (just two knobs, and a “ping” sound when it’s done) and smallest microwave oven I’ve ever met, but there’s still not really room for it. Delivery would have been cheaper than the bus ticket, but imagine what an equivalent gym session (obviously I am now shredded AF after the carrying 💪) would have cost.

• That reminds me: I was briefly curious about gyms a few weeks ago, and read the phrase “Unlimited* Sports Water”, which is just brilliant. Somewhere, this Sports Water and its limits are explained, but I’d prefer it to remain a mystery, and I refuse to join any gym that would have me as a member, so I’ll continue taking kitchen appliances for walks instead.

• Also unrelatedly, joined a “car club”, which is not like the Dodge Charger Owners’ Club but lets you hire a motor car, which might be useful occasionally.