An open letter to my toaster

Dear Toaster,
Generally, you’ve treated me quite well over the years. Generally. The main exception being the time you decided that instead of letting the toast casually pop up like normal, you’d shoot it up into the air and across the bench, where it slid for a while before falling off the edge and on to the floor. Then I had to make more toast. I’m a busy woman, Toaster. I don’t have time for such shenanigans.

As a child I was not properly educated about you, besides constantly being told not to stick a knife in you. Which is fair enough. I wouldn’t want anyone sticking a knife in me, either.

You’ve shown your vindictiveness by not warning me when I’ve forgotten to turn your toasty-ness setting back up to 4 after I put it down to 1 to do some pop tarts. Then the bread comes out and it’s not toast. It’s just slightly warm bread. And I still don’t have time for these shenanigans. Then there’s the occasional completely spontaneous burn, which I’m pretty sure you do just to torment me since I found out that being able to smell burnt toast is one of the symptoms of a stroke.

It’s not all bad though, you did do me the service of burning my mum’s toast so badly one morning that it set off the smoke detector. Thanks to you I now know that if the house is on fire and that baby goes off, I’m going to soundly sleep my way into a smokey grave.

But, dear toaster, I have noticed a major design flaw. I call it ‘the soft edge’ and it makes me sick. I realise you can’t toast the top edge of the bread, what with how it’s sticking out the top and all, but it’s something that’s always bothered me.

To avoid this, I’ve recently been toasting my bread under the griller. The issue here is that I have the attention span of a 2 year old and tend to wander off, only to return when my house starts to fill with smoke.

Anyway, I appreciate that you try, and you still beat a stick and an open flame.

Sincerely, Your hungry friend Lauren

PS: Wikipedia says that the ‘lever on the side of the toaster is depressed’. You might want to look into that.