No matter what temperature we set, our new budget oven either blackened our food or refused to cook it. As ovens go it was as useful as a rubber knife in a balloon popping competition. Like Toad of Toad Hall impersonating a washer woman, we tried all sorts of tactics. We tried coaxing it, slapping it and punching it as well as glaring and yelling at it. All to no avail. No matter what we tried, the oven (I’ll call it Chief) just refused to co-operate and turned out food that was either black or raw.
We tried gentle hints. We carefully nudged the temperature dial up a notch at a time, hoping Chief would suddenly wake up and realise his life’s purpose and cook a chicken properly. We tried twisting his tail by twisting the dial aggressively onto full. But like a hibernating bear in his winter cave, he couldn’t be roused. We dreamt of a roast chicken cooked right through from north to south and east to west with a tasty golden brown patina over the whole bird. But that remained a fantasy. Occasionally Chief woke up like a fiery dragon and created a smoky blackened burnt sacrifice. Was this spite or stupidity? Fury or foolishness? We couldn’t decide. He was as unpredictable as a runaway rooster. Hadn’t Chief been taught the basics of oven life by his parents? Did he bribe his way through the oven testing program? Despite our entreaties, encouragement and threats, Chief remained erratic and uncooperative.
After a family conference we decided to face the music, bite the bullet, take the bull by the horns and complain to the manufacturer. The Chief factory was only a few suburbs away, so we hoped for speedy neighbourly help. The technician duly turned up on a day, time and month of his own choosing. His name was Terry O’Toole and he carried a whole toolbox of trusty tools for neutralizing customer complaints.
When we explained the oven’s symptoms his first response was the tried-and-true sellers’ response “You’re the first people to ever complain about that.”
Like all vendors who hope their responsibility ends with taking your cash, he wanted to put us onto the back foot from the start. He wanted to sow the seed of an idea that we were the problem, not the product.
“This is our most reliable model” added Terry, sensing his blow had bruised our self-confidence. “We never have problems with this one. Old Reliable we call it.”
We searched our souls. Were we indeed, too fussy, too sensitive and not inclusive enough of incompetent ovens? Should we just put up with whatever we could get in the roast meat line like our caveman and woman ancestors of old? Shouldn’t we simply eat whatever chicken we could catch and cook in haste before we in turn were eaten by the local sabre-toothed tiger? Raw? Burnt? Did it really matter? It was all protein wasn’t it? With a prehistoric life expectancy of about 36 hours what did it matter anyway?
But no! Our inner sense of justice was outraged and the bitter taste of raw chicken with charcoal glaze stuck in our throats. After all, we had paid a small amount of good money for Chief and we deserved to get what we paid for.
In a heated family discussion, our frustration boiled over like a bubbling cauldron of cliches. The whole family vented their spleens.
“If Chief was flipping burgers he would be flipped right out the drive-thru” raved the family burger devotee.
“If he was a salad maker in a salad bar he’d be tossed” ranted the family vegetarian.
“If he was a percussionist in the school band he would be drummed out” screamed the musician of the family.
Stiffened by our moral outrage we stood our ground against the scornful insinuations of technician O’Toole.
When O’Toole saw that we had regrouped he tried another tack in his “shift the blame to the customer” strategy.
“Of course you probably didn’t install it properly.” he said with a superior smirk.
We were already prepared for this thrust with a parry of our own. We pulled out the original purchase and installation documentation and handed them to O’Toole the tech with a flourish.
The installation and power connection had been signed off by one Nick Tesla under the seal of the Chief Oven Co.
“This guy Tesla installed it. Know him?“ we said, as haughtily as we could.
“My boss” mumbled Terry.
Score one for the customer.
Undeterred, O’Toole came back at us with a quick counter punch.
“Do you realise” he said with great gravity as though he was about to announce he had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, “that this is by far our most popular model which has sold millions and our customers all swear by it?”
We could see why people would swear at Chief but not swear by him. Terry was cunning. He was trying to use peer pressure and the desire to conform to sow seeds of cancerous self-doubt.
We looked at one another, a family in a crisis of uncertainty. How could all those million customers be wrong? Were we the problem after all?
We took a look in the mirrors of our mobile phones and decided to toughen up. We knew in our heart of hearts that we held the moral high ground and that O’Toole was a lowly snake.
We adopted the Tommy Lee Jones approach from the movie “The Fugitive”. In the movie, Harrison Ford, the escapee unjustly convicted of murder protested “I didn’t kill my wife!”
Tommy Lee Jones, the US marshal obsessed with recapturing him then declared to Harrison (who was pointing a gun at his head) “I don’t care!”
We shot off our salvo.
“We don’t care if everyone in Australia has bought one of these ovens and thinks of it as a treasured member of the family! It doesn’t cook properly! It’s a dud, a lemon, a piece of culinary junk.”
Having exhausted his “blame the customer” routines, O’Toole reluctantly agreed to test the oven.
“As a special favour” he said disdainfully “I will go and get a chicken and cook it properly for you”.
We knew what he was doing. He wanted to create some sort of obligation to himself, some sort of communal roast chicken fellowship so we would back off. He headed for the local supermarket and came back with a small fresh fowl. He carefully placed the bird in a baking tray and put it into Chief’s gaping oven mouth, slammed it shut and turned on the oven. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and started doing something on his company iPad. “Lots of reports to finish” he said, trying to sound important. A glance over his shoulder showed us he was doing online sports betting.
Sometime later he checked the progress of the cooking and gave a surprised suppressed cough.
“Always turn it over midway through, to cook it evenly” he warned us. As I turned to go out of the kitchen O’Toole discreetly pulled out a small hammer and gave three sharp taps to the bottom heating element.
“Grease I expect” he mumbled as though we had committed a crime.
“You really must clean the oven every time you use it” he concluded as both an accusation and diversion.
Once again it seemed that we were the problem according to the O’Toole doctrine of oven repair.
Sometime later he announced that the chook was cooked. He pulled it out of the oven, cut off a drumstick and gnawed it happily while we salivated.
“Just like I said, we never had any problems with these ovens. And just to show our goodwill, I won’t charge you for the service call.”
With that he wrapped up the roast chicken, put it in his bag and strode out the door. Having been smelling roast chicken for quite a while we all grumbled that we would have preferred him to show goodwill by leaving us the chicken rather than kidnapping it. But to be fair Terry had fixed the problem. We worked out that the bottom element had only ever been working intermittently and Mr O’Toole’s hammer therapy had given it a wakeup call.
After the percussion treatment Chief got his act together and worked quite well (off and on) as long as we kept a hammer handy.
A few years later we updated the kitchen and Chief had to go. In the end we sold him for $20 to somebody who wanted an oven (in any condition) to fill an oven shaped hole in a house he was selling.
We were confident that this was one job that Chief could do perfectly.
-Geoff Milton
