The “popcorn” button on the microwave serves no purpose. It shouldn’t be there.

First, some background:

Back when I used to anchor all the time, I’d get bored and hungry. I started bringing in a bag of pretzels and would eat out of it and watch Wheel of Fortune during a part of my day which I called “Pretzel Time.”

At the end of Pretzel Time, I’d call up the traffic reporter (who had also been watching Wheel of Fortune) on the IFB, which is an ancient radio term meaning “button you push so you can talk to a traffic reporter even though she’s in Las Colinas,” and say something like “I cannot believe he didn’t get ‘Popular Opinion!’ He had the ‘P’ and the ‘O!'”

Then the economy apparently recovered and we hired Mark Watkins to anchor and I went back to reporting. I was filling in for Mark for a week recently, but I didn’t have any pretzels at the house. I decided to bring in some microwave popcorn instead.

“What a great idea!” I thought to myself. “You’ll just microwave one of the little bags every day instead of having to fumble with the chip clip.”

But as I’m sure you all know, there’s a very slim margin of error when you’re cooking popcorn. If you don’t leave it in long enough, you’ll wind up with a bunch of unpopped, useless kernels. Leave it in too long and it burns.

I was also using an unknown microwave, which was a recipe for disaster (as opposed to, say, a recipe for popcorn that tastes like movie theater butter). I knew I would have to carefully monitor the situation for that brief period after the interval between popping noises increased but before the popping stopped entirely:

Unfortunately, I never did find find the sweet-spot. In fact, there was one day when there were too many unpopped kernels AND the rest of it was burnt, leading me to wonder if our parent company is skimping on its microwave budget.

There’s got to be an easier way. The microwave in our breakroom has a popcorn button, but every popcorn manufacturer clearly prints “Do NOT use the popcorn button” on the bag.

My phone can identify and give me directions to nine Ethiopian restaurants within 25 miles of my current location, but you’re telling me no one can design a microwave with an intuitive popcorn button?

There are all kinds of buttons on the break room microwave, and I wouldn’t trust a single one of them. One reads “beverage.” This thing doesn’t know whether I’m putting water or a bowl of goat blood in there.

I think it’s time for someone at GE to figure out how to build a microwave with one button like the iPhone. You’d put your food or “beverage” inside and the microwave would just figure out what you’re trying to do. Instead of a beep, the microwave could have a voice like the new iPhone that tells you “Your pizza rolls are ready, but your bowl of goat blood will need another minute.”

You’d have put the goat blood in a covered container, of course.

I don’t see how the station can afford to let an anchor take a day off until we get this thing straightened out. Unless our parent company takes the money it saved cutting corners on microwaves and bought some pretzels for the newsroom.

An aside: Someone put a magnet with the Ten Commandments on the breakroom refrigerator. I don’t know if someone’s trying to send a message, but I haven’t noticed any increase in covetous behavior among the air staff.