On Christmas morning, we broke my parents’ microwave.
It was a Christmas brunch, and there was a whole lot of bacon to cook. So we did it in the microwave–batch after batch after batch, cycle after cycle, until suddenly there was a horrible smell of burning plastic and a swirl of smoke and the machine was quickly ejected from the festivities to sit forlornly on the carport, where we watched warily to see if it would burst into flames or not. (It didn’t.)
It was an old microwave–I can say this because appliances age much more quickly these days than they used to–and no one was really surprised or deterred by its sudden demise. And we had done without a microwave for years when I was growing up, so no one was in a hurry to replace it, either. So we left it outside and moved our bacon-making to the stovetop.