DATE: Friday, October 24, 1997 TAG: 9710230306 SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 08 EDITION: FINAL COLUMN: OVER EASY LENGTH: 64 lines
I went out and bought a new coffee maker the other day. Not that there was anything wrong with my old one, but because the new one turns itself off. I replaced my old iron with a new one a couple of years ago, for the same reason.
So, apparently, have a lot of other people who share my fear of walking out of the house and coming back to an irate battalion chief and a pile of cinders.
``Lady,'' I can imagine the smoke eater admonishing me, ``how many times do you have to be told that if you turn it on, you gotta turn it off?''
Well, I've got news for him. That admonition may have been on target 20 years ago, but not any more. The other day I took stock of the things in my house that turn themselves off when I'm not around to tend to them. It's an impressive list.
I can hit the sleep button on my clock radio and listen to 59 minutes plus 59 seconds of Brahms before it, too, goes off into dreamland. I can program the bedroom TV to let me catch Jay Leno's monologue, then drop off to sleep knowing I won't wake up with John Cash giving me the 6 a.m. forecast from his weather watcher in Manteo.
I can be assured that the VCR will capture ``Murphy Brown'' without including whatever inane sitcom CBS sees fit to follow her show with on any particular Wednesday.
I can set the oven to stop cooking the roast somewhere between mooing and charcoal. I even have a kitchen timer that will turn off the stew I leave in the crock pot, even when I get caught behind a TRT trolley and four blue hairs from a bridge club on my way home from work.
If I walk away from my computer it goes into a sleep mode requiring me to attack it with the mouse if I want it to wake up again.
My clothes dryer has something that senses temperature and moisture, then moves itself into a cool down mode before finally dropping everything in a little heap at the bottom of the drum.
My vacuum cleaner wheezes to a stop after 30 paper clips, 200 feet of dental floss, a full hutch of dust bunnies and two pounds of Lhasa hair cut off the air circulation in its bag.
Still appliances do sometimes forget to turn themselves off at all. The results can be interesting. I remember a neighbor whose trash compactor decided to go beyond the call of duty one day. By the time she realized what was going on, the ram had hoisted itself 6 inches above the high load mark and taken her counter top with it.
The cabinet repair man said he'd never seen anything like it. He took pictures for his scrapbook. He took money for his wallet. Lots of pictures and lots of money.
Whether such automatic off functions work or not, I see a major trend here. I predict that by the year 2010, the off button will be a thing of the past. No matter what the appliance is supposed to do, it will complete its job, give a little click or sigh, then take a rest until summoned again.
In the interest of nostalgia, some of us will hang on to those things that allow a human to be the judge of when a job is finished.
Oh, by the way, that expensive new automatic shut-off coffee maker that I bought has a problem. Even though it's the top line model in the same brand that's been brewing great coffee for me for more than 10 years, this one can't turn out a cup of java that's worth a darn. So I drink one cup of the dishwater stuff that it presents me with, then go up to 7-Eleven for a really good swallow of the hot, black stuff.
At least I can be sure that no firefighters will greet my return. Unless, that is, the fancy new pot gets a yen to do what my neighbor's compactor did.
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