Lessons from My Toaster

My toaster oven taught me a very powerful lesson about change this week.

Our kitchen is shared space among me, my wife, and two of our three 20-year old sons. All of us use the toaster oven. It is the go to device, because the microwave makes things hot but doesn't make things good.

Our toaster oven is also an air fryer, broiler, and a bunch of other mysterious functions I can't even begin to figure out. I do know if I ever want to make pemmican, this toaster oven can do it.

How do I know that? Because this week, as I was making a croissant sandwich, I slammed the pastry into the oven and punched go. I then wandered off to do other things, and each time I came back my croissant was not toasting. So I let it keep going, while I worked on the other parts of the sandwich I wanted to make.

After a full 12 minutes, still no toasting. That's when I realized I hadn't looked at the function the toaster oven was using, and my croissant had received two full cycles of dehydration. When I opened the toaster oven to check on it, the croissant flew apart like a dandelion.

So what does that teach us about change? My mistake was beginning something without a full understanding of the real conditions. A simple check would have allowed me to make the right change, to implement the right set of tasks. I didn't do that, and as a result carefully swept up the various bits of croissant to start over.