I was a college student, living in a small condo near BSU with 3 other guys, in the mid-1980's
The place was old, and (like most college-based condos) not in the best repair.
One night, I made the fateful decision to have a chicken pot pie for dinner (this is college, man, you eat what you can afford).
I put it in the oven (a real oven, we didn't have a microwave), turned it on, set the timer, and went back to my room to read. As I left the kitchen I heard a loud mechanical "clunk," though didn't think anything of it at the time. The dump was full of weird noises.
When I wandered back 30 minutes later, I discovered the oven had somehow activated its self-cleaning mode - meaning it locks the oven door and heats itself up to something on the Kelvin scale to incinerate anything inside. Including my dinner.
The whole condo at this point began smelling like a chicken pot pie. I turned off the oven, only to discover that it had broken. Even with the cleaning cycle stopped. The door was locked and couldn't be opened.
I walked over to McD's that night for dinner.
The chicken pie was now a fixture of the condo. There was no way to get the oven door open without tearing it apart. The landlord didn't really care about fixing it since the place was falling apart, and the 3 of us didn't have the money to fix it ourselves. So we left it there.
As the semester progressed the kitchen would occasionally develop a weird smell from the culture medium residing in the oven. When this happened (every few weeks) we'd turn the oven on for a while to bake the culture into oblivion for another month or so. We'd turn it off again when it began to smell like chicken & mold pot pie. For all I know the oven had become a primordial soup experiment, and some new life form was evolving.
When I moved out 6 months later the pie was still in there. For all I know it still is.
So, if you're a college student living in a run-down condo with a locked oven that smells like a chicken pot pie when turned on... I'm sorry.
15 comments:
Thank you for the laugh. I can only imagine the smell.
Cluck...cluck...anybody out there???
Invited to dinner at the Grumpy home, politely demur and offer to take everyone out to a fancy restaurant. Life Hacks of Packer
You're fortunate that those things contain almost no actual chicken, or it might have been much worse.
Why didn't you and your roommates just throw the oven off the roof, like normal college students?
I'm thinking you never "cooked" on an upside down steam iron supported by the backs of two straight chairs tied together for safety (!?) with a belt?
One unmistakable aroma common to dorms, barracks, whatever -- burned popcorn.
Self-cleaning cycles lock the door for safety reasons. It should unlock when it cools down but apparently yours didn't.
I would have put it on clean until the CPP was a briquette.
That's so deliciously gross. But you boys persevered in grand style.
This story just made my day. Thanks!
So many great comments and a delightful story. Chicken pot pie was quite upscale from the Cheap Feed most of us endured...ramen noodles and popcorn. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you weren't bragging.
LOL Thanks...our ovens were't that modern. LOL
After all these years, someone finally deciphered the song lyrics.
Is that a mouse in there?
Quite likely new life forms have evolved from that culture, may be moving on our planet by now. I think we need to alert SETI.
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