Joe Bennett: Death of a microwave leads to musings on life

The death of his microwave sparked Joe Bennett to ponder the meaning of life, the universe and all that it contains.

I remember the advent of the microwave oven. It came with blaring trumpets. It would revolutionise the way food was cooked. People would dispense with their hobs, their conventional ovens. Everything we ate would emerge from that dinky futuristic metal box. And if our bacon went rubbery and our chips stayed pale we could buy sizzler plates to crisp things up, and browning powder to darken them down and all manner of things would be well.

Or, that is, we could just carry on using our conventional hob and oven, which of course is what happened. The microwave withdrew to a corner of the bench top where it served to reheat left-overs and to defrost the outer edges of trays of mince. And perhaps because of this less-than Herculean workload it demonstrated one good quality. It rarely went wrong.

I have owned two microwave ovens. The first spent 20 years not going wrong until on the 22nd of February 2011, in the one rogue action of its life, it left its shelf, ripped its plug from the socket, flew several metres across the kitchen, crashed into the wall and died.

For the next 12 years its replacement led a similarly irreproachable if unexciting life. But then, last month, it began to falter. Left-overs emerged from it less warm than I’d expected. And finally yesterday a bowl of frozen peas went into it and came out three minutes later as a bowl of frozen peas. What what? I said, and turned the thing off at the wall and then turned it back on, at which point the microwave oven, bless its electronic heart, whimpered, threw its hands in the air and declared in the little window where it normally tells the time, H98.

H98 was all it had left to say. What was I supposed to make of H98?

When the bull-necked sermonist calls for a return to family values so stridently that you know it is only a matter of time before he is exposed as having been altogether too hands -on with the treble section of the choir, H98.ual and the surprisingly thick rice-cooker manual, I found the beast I sought. It was compendious enough to have an index. I went to H. No reference to 98. I went to Time Display. No H98. I went to Troubleshooting. No H98

None of us knows how we will react when we are dying. We don’t know what we’ll do or say or feel or think, whether we will acquiesce or whether we will rage against the coming dark. The microwave had been dying for a week. And in the end it all became too much. When I tried to gee it up just one more time by turning it on and off at the wall, it was one time too many. It had defrosted the edges of its last tray of mince. It had warmed it last leathery slice of pizza. It had had enough. It hadn’t been much of a life, anyway, and now it was done with it. It was throwing in the towel. H98, it said. H bloody 98.

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a supercomputer is asked to address the question ‘What is the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything?’ It thinks a bit then comes up with the answer 42. This is by way of a Douglas Adams joke. It mocks our optimism, our futile quest for meaning.

H98 seems to me an anti-42. It’s the obverse of an answer. It means nothing except its own meaninglessness. It says there’s nothing to be said. It says the battle over meaning has been fought and lost. I’m tired, says H98. Let them have it how they will. I’m sick of my life of left-overs.

We all of us need an H98. When the self-proclaimed installation artist explains that she makes use of found materials to explore themes of alienation and identity, H98.

When the bull-necked sermonist calls for a return to family values so stridently that you know it is only a matter of time before he is exposed as having been altogether too hands on with the treble section of the choir, H98.

When the menu says drizzled, or nestled, or pan-fried instead of fried, or oven-baked instead of baked, or 28.5 instead of $28.50, H98.

When Trump… but you’ve got the idea. And if you haven’t, what do I care? With no trumpets blaring I took the microwave to the dump this morning. Or rather to the Ecodrop Transfer Station. H98.