There is some rubbish going around on the internet about how the numbers on these toaster
dials are actually minutes.
And it completely, utterly untrue and I shall now prove it. All these four toasters are
set to 2 on each of their dials.
We have the cheap toaster, beloved of students everywhere.
We have the not so cheap toaster, beloved of people who have just stopped being students
and thought "I shouldn't buy the cheapest toaster".
And we have the slightly more expensive toaster, for people who think that "adjustable, removable
crumb tray" is a good feature.
We also have the office toaster, which I have nicked from the office next door.
All of them set to 2, and I guarantee you none of them will pop up at exactly two minutes.
Why? Because toasters don't have timing chips on them. They're far too cheap for that. What
these have is a bi-metallic strip. Two bits of metal back to back, that heat up and expand
at different rates, so the strip slowly curves. What you're changing with these dials is how
far that strip has to curve before it triggers the thing that pops the toast up again.
There we go, nowhere near two minutes. And a completely different time to all these other
toasters.
Two minutes on the toaster dials is absolutely rubbish. And here's the thing: it doesn't
even make sense. Because even if there were minutes -- what would that do to help you?
You'd still have to experiment through trial and error to find out how many minutes your
particular type of bread needs to be in there for, and I'll tell you, it's way more than
we've currently got.
The office toaster? The one that is apparently meant to be this "enterprise grade" thing
designed to toast -- toast your toast quickly? No. Nothing at all. What we have here are
four completely different toasters, all set to the same dial number, none of them popping
up at two minutes.
Someone is wrong on the internet and now you can correct them.
Would anyone like some toast?
(That's not very well done.)
It's not actually done at all, is it!
(That's terrible.)
What I love is that we're still rolling, and this toaster still hasn't popped up. That's
how different the dials are
We are literally waiting for toast to pop up now -- there we go!
(Tom?)
Yeah.
(I think that one was two minutes.)
What, on the nose?
Ha! Okay, so maybe the expensive ones do have timers in them.
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