What’s the best thing about burnt popcorn?

Trick Question! There is nothing good about burnt popcorn.

In fact, I stongly dislike the person that makes popcorn at work.  It stinks the whole place up for the rest of the day and makes me want some of my own popcorn – neither outcome is desirable.

But let me just confess right now.

I was that person last week.  In a moment of desperation I had to resort to popcorn as a mid-morning snack.  I had searched the drawers in my desk for something else, something healthier, something more mid-morning appropriate, like a cereal bar…. alas a bag of popcorn was all I found (most likely left over in my back pack from a movie night long gone).

Had my judgement not been clouded by hunger I would have remembered that our microwave is notoriously powerful. Food gets hot in there in about half the time of most other microwaves.

Had I remembered the time-honored perils of cooking popcorn AT ALL, I wouldn’t have ran to the bathroom after pushing the start button.

*It was WORSE than this.*

{{cta(’98f38b19-1371-4c85-aeb1-0d6d520286d6′)}}
Unfortunately, I did neither of those things.  I came out of the bathroom to find smoke billowing…. spewing….out of the microwave.   (Expletive, Expletive, Expletive). I yell loud enough to all the nearby offices that the fire alarm is going to go off, as I pull the culprit out of the microwave and rush over to the sink with it.  I turn the water on and look around frantically for a window to open or a door to use as a fan, but there are none… (cue frantic running in circles, at a loss to prevent the inevitable).

Alas. There goes the fire alarm. I rush into my boss’s office to tell him what happened to find him on a conference call with an inquitive look…. “Not a fire! I set the fire alarm off!” Our receptionist searches for a number to call and let the fire department know its not an emergency.

Meanwhile, the entire building (and two people from the office next door) evacuate.  To make matters worse its one of the first very cold days of December.  So we’re freezing.  But eventually the fire marshal comes to turn the alarm off and we file back into the building.

To make a long story longer, the office smelled like burnt popcorn for 3 days, the incident makes the top five most embarrassing moments of my life, they call me jiffy pop at work and won’t let me use the microwave anymore.

What, may you ask did I learn from this experience?  1. Be prepared.  Think ahead.  Have cereal bars stashed everywhere. 2. Turn the power setting down on the microwave. 3. Don’t leave the microwave when cooking ? (Yeah, we all know this one…I had a serious lapse in judgement).

The real principle? Everyone makes mistakes, even if they’ve done something a thousand times.

Anyone else got any other principles from this incident?

{{cta(‘086bd7a8-05a0-4877-9c40-8458bb49ecd0’)}}