You've all seen this appliance before. This inconvenient roast machine. This unimpeccable menace. The lot of us have the same irreconcilable unanswered question about what the numbers mean, the same feeling of loss as their bread gets ruined because this fucking thing imposes a multitude of transparency issues.
It's the toaster.
I hate the toaster. This stupid all-failing tool that somehow everybody has. We all expect our sliced gluten to go in there, stay for a while, and then come out changed, changed properly. But it's not as easy as it should be, as this device seems intent on burning it, and good luck if your bread gets stuck in there. You will not get it out in one piece. And god help you if you try to get the imprisoned wheat slab out but leave it plugged in.
If you think that was bad, try explaining to your kids why against all the nice stories they were told, in spite of all the false positivity, their hash browns are forfeit. Let's be honest. You can't actually put your hash browns in there. This string of poor optimism second-chance experiences almost made me think hash browns were useless, until I discovered actually functional ways to cook them. The toaster does hash browns a disservice.
This common household menace is a menace too common. This simple household fuckup is a fallacy of being called simple. The simple thing about it is that unless you really know what you're doing, you'll simply fuck up your toasting. Except it's not your fault, it's the toaster's. The toaster wants you dead. The toaster will burn your bread, not heat your bread enough before taking its second use to burn your bread, trap and disintegrate your hash browns, dump bundles of old bread dust if you try to get stuff out of it with shaking and gravity, break significantly so that you have to hold the lever down yourself, insult you, and probably burn your house down.