The Universe and Me

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Wavelength you never let me down, no

The Great Mica Plate Search of 2016. One Sunday I was about to make cookies. When I went to soften some butter in the microwave, sparks started flying around inside the thing. Hit stop. Not what I was going for. Take out butter. Look inside. Is that something stuck to the metal thing on the side? No, it's a hole in the metal thing on the side. The metal thing, the internet informs me, is called the Wave Guard. It protects food from the micro waves, logically. Rather than buying a new microwave, all one has to do is go to your local appliance or hardware store, buy a $5 mica sheet (see photo above) and cut it to the appropriate side. Replace.

Not so fast, Blofeld. I apparently live in the Middle of Nowhere. Every store I checked for mica had never heard of it. Bringing along my hole-y sample did not help. Employees looked at it like it was some strange metal from an alien spaceship or similar and looked at me as if I was from Mars. "I've never seen anything like this," they said, one after another. So much for shopping locally. Frustrated, I went home and magically ordered some mica sheets off the internet. They needed to take the slow boat from Hong Kong but arrived safely after about three weeks of microwaveless living. With scissors, I carefully cut one sheet to size and slid it in the wave guard spot and voila! Microwave works perfectly. It was a four dollar fix. Worth the wait. And since the mica comes in sheets of two, I still have a spare should this ever happen again.

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