h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why do toasters have a setting that burns toast?

B

In actual fact, toasters only have two settings, one just warms the bread slightly, whilst moving the control a fraction of a millimetre further will transform your beautifully fresh bread into a blackened lump of carbon....


I reckon the toaster manufacturers are in league with the bakers... it's all a conspiracy to get us to buy more bread

It's a conspiracy to sell more expensive toasters, with the settings:
white cold, white lukewarm, white hot, black hot, burning.

Naw you missed a setting....

white cold, white lukewarm, white hot, black hot, burning and oops, time to redecorate the kitchen dear!

And then you get Pop-Tart syndrome, where they're always either frozen in the middle, or so liquid that all the strawberry jam runs out and burns you down the shirtfront

B

and why don't they fit the crumb tray with weight detctors to prevent what happened to me last week, or was the combustion of the crumbs a "undocumented feature" automatic crumb incineration

CH

Nah...If you own you toaster long enough you will, by changing the setting one quarter of a millimeter per toast-session, find the perfect setting for you.
Then your flat-mate/whatever comes along and sets it back to blacker than the black hole of calcutta.......because "a little bit of charoal is good for you"

why is there never a setting for "bu**er I dropped my keys in the toaster again, if I pull this leaver it will give them back." ?

I supose it's our fault for having a key rack above the toaster, but I don;t see why it has to be so damned difficult to get the toaster to give them back again.

FABT

I suppose you could always try toasting them
I can imagine the sport now - as a red-hot set of key jumps out of the toaster, and you have to catch them and put them in your pocket without burning yourself.

B

I've often thought that the toaster settings were a plot by the exercise gurus, so we'd burn more calories than we take in, by scraping the char off.....

That is supposing of course that we still want to eat the darned stuff at that point!

SC

As Richard always says, 'If it's brown, it's done. If it's black, it's b*******d.'

Actually, toast is a very personal thing. Richard's idea of 'done' is too dark for me. But he still manages to do toast just the way I like it, bless him!

The toaster in our kitchen is graduated, having a timer rather than a number of settings. I've found the perfect setting (about 1 1/2 minutes) to turn a piece of bread from frozen to lightly yellow-browned and crunchy. Of course, there are problems with the toaster. One of them is that it makes a load and annoying tickering noise whenever in use. Another is that, if something is damp when it goes in, it will stick to the sides and come out as two or three incomplete pieces. And then there's....
I think that the perfect toaster has been designed somewhere, and each designer uses it as the basis, adjusting a few pieces to make it just that little bit less perfect. Why? No idea.

Probably that whole Allah thing.

When you say it's graduated - you mean it's got a degree? That is one hell of an intelligent toaster . You're looking for 'gradiated, methinks. Apologies for the sarcasm.

B

From Merriam-Webster Online:
Graduated

2 a : to mark with degrees of measurement b : to divide into grades or intervals

Right back at you!

Dammit . What does gradiated mean, then? Anyway, I'm a Scrabble player - I use Chambers and don't bother with words longer than 8 letter very often.

B

It's the same with showers. In the immortal words of Eddie Izzard:

'One nano-millimetre between boiling hot and f***ing freezing'

Must be the same guys who make the dials for both...

'Too cold!'

*turn dial slightly*

' Too hot!'

Stay ,
WD

From Chambers online
graduate verb (graduated, graduating)

4 to mark (eg a thermometer) with units of measurement or other divisions.

Gradiated:
No exact matches for gradiated

Sorry, couldn't resist

It's come to a sad thing. I've spent so much time on H2G2 I'm starting to make up words. I'm going back to my 'what's the highest score you can make in a turn of Scrabble' forum now. Making up words there is bound to get me 2000 points or so.

B

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (for me, that's the 'Bible' of English spelling), there is no such word as 'gradiated', There is 'gradate', which means 'to cause to pass by imperceptible degrees from one shade of colour to another' or 'to arrange in steps or grades of size, etc.' Maybe this is what they try to do with the toaster dials. The toast is 'caused to pass by imperceptible degrees from one shade of colour (white) to another (black)'. Just a thought