Hardly Seems Worth It

Having watched my fair share of PSA-filled cartoons in my youth, I am well aware that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. However, unlike not smoking or how bad an idea is it to hide in an old refrigerator or jump a downed power line on my bike, for some reason that lesson just never worked its way all the way in, because I almost never eat breakfast. It's just one of those things. Most morning my breakfast is a gigantic cup of tea. But this doesn't mean I don't enjoy food that is supposed to be eaten at breakfast - Pop-Tarts are a favorite of mine, I just don't eat them when they were intended to. And when I have them as a late afternoon snack I often take the unusual step to toast them. Now, recently I tried the new Cinnabon breakfast sticks (also in the afternoon) and found them quite good. But the package suggested I would like them better when warm, so I flipped the box over to get the heating directions. That was when the following sentence caught my eye:

Microwave on high for 3 seconds.

Seriously? Three seconds? That is awfully quick, don't you think? I microwave ice cream for longer than three seconds when I'm trying to defrost it coming out of the freezer. I'm never even totally sure that the microwave door is closed for the first couple of seconds when I use it, but in this case that would be the entire cooking process. Hell, the beep from starting the clock will still be hanging in the air when the bell letting you know your food is done will be going off. Finding a paper towel to put underneath the breakfast stick takes longer than three seconds. I'm all for quick and easy cooking of food, but this is ridiculous. Not to mention, how warm can it really get in three seconds? I can only assume they went with that amount of time because it seemed less condescending than writing, "If you would like this warm, hold it close to your mouth and breath on it. It's two bites, idiot. Why are you even bothering to heat this up?"

This is just another example of technology becoming more advanced than we need it to be. There is no need for food to be cooked this quickly. If you can't wait 10 seconds for something then that is on you, not society. Therefore, I would like to announced that we should be all done working with microwave technology. We're cooking food in the time it takes for a hummingbird to flap its wings a hundred times, so we've gone as far as we are going to go with this. Much like adding a bunch of unnecessary features to the toothbrush, now we're starting to take things in a direction they don't need to go. If you're cooking things in a microwave for less than five seconds then it probably doesn't need to be hot anyway. Congratulations, scientists - you've won. Start working on something else.