I went into the kitchen at 8:00 to start dinner, and decided to have a grilled cheese sandwich and french (ever the traitor) fries. So I turned the oven to 450° and came back to the computer while waiting for it (the oven, not the computer) to pre-heat. A while later I returned to the kitchen to discover that the oven was still cold (though, interestingly, the computer was quite warm): while I had set the one dial to the correct temperature, I had not remembered to turn the other to the “bake” setting.
After trying again, the oven did pre-heat, and when the french fries were about five minutes away from being ready, I put a slice of sandwich bread on the Sunbeam grill, added some sharp cheddar cheese, topped it off with another slice of bread, closed the grill top, and dialed the timer to five minutes. When I returned five minutes later, however, the sandwich was cold. While I had correctly dialed the timer, I had failed to plug the grill into the electrical outlet.
It’s a wonder I don’t forget to keep breathing.
Heh. Usually, after I set the oven to pre-heat, and go to the computer, I end up completely forgetting about the oven. I’ll start to smell the faint burning of crumbs from the previous cooking experiment, and be like, “Doh!” as I run back to the kitchen.
Oh, I’ve done that, too, and worse than that… after finishing dinner, on several occasions I’ve then left the oven on, once for almost 24 hours; I discovered it only by realizing that the kitchen–an interior room, so normally cooler than the southwest-facing rooms–felt so much warmer than the rest of the house when I got home from work the following day. I kept dreading the arrival of my electric bill that month.