Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Toasters

Well, if yesterday was any indication, this week is going to suck like a top-of-the-line Electrolux. I need funny. Happily, the beloved Miss Cellania has come through with this take on the features of toasters manufactured by the people who brought you computers (and other products) ...

If Oracle made toasters, they'd claim their toaster was compatible with all brands and styles of bread, but when you got it home you'd discover the Bagel Engine was still in development, the Croissant Extension was three years away, and that indeed the whole appliance was just blowing smoke.

If Hewlett-Packard made toasters, they would market the Reverse Toaster, which takes in toast and gives you regular bread.

If IBM made toasters, they would want one big toaster where people bring bread to be submitted for overnight toasting. IBM would claim a worldwide market for five, maybe six toasters.

If Xerox made toasters, you could toast one-sided or double-sided. Successive slices would get lighter and lighter. The toaster would jam your bread for you.

If Radio Shack made toasters, the staff would sell you a toaster, but not know anything about it. Or you could buy all the parts to build your own toaster.

If Thinking Machines made toasters, you would be able to toast 64,000 pieces of bread at the same time.

A toaster made by Cray would cost $16 million, but would be faster than any other single-slice toaster in the world.

A toaster manufactured by The Rand Corporation would be a large, perfectly smooth and seamless black cube. Every morning there would be a piece of toast on top of it. The service department would have an unlisted phone number, and the blueprints for the toaster would be highly classified government documents. Fringe would have an episode about it.

A toaster from the National Security Agency would have a secret trap door that only the NSA could access in case they needed to access your toast for reasons of national security. The toaster would have to be kept in a special safe in your basement and you would have to pass a lie detector test and have a top secret security clearance in order to eat your toast. Uneaten pieces of toast would have to be completely burned and the ashes scattered.

ToastMan, the Sony toaster, would be barely larger than the single piece of bread it is meant to toast, and could be conveniently attached to your belt.

If Timex made toasters, they would be cheap and small quartz-crystal wrist toasters that take a licking and keep on toasting slices of baguettes.

If Fisher-Price made toasters, "Baby's First Toaster" would have a hand-crank that you turn to toast the bread, which would pop up like a Jack-in-the-box when it was done.

If Microsoft made toasters, every time you bought a loaf of bread, you would have to buy a new toaster. You wouldn't have to take the toaster, but you'd still have to pay for it anyway. Toaster 7 wouldweigh 15,000 pounds (requiring a reinforced steel countertop), draw enough electricity to power a small city, take up 95% of the space in your kitchen, claim to be the first toaster that lets you control how light or dark you want your toast to be, and would secretly interrogate your other appliances to find out who made them. You wouldn't be able to toast any bread until you entered a 25-character activation code, and the toaster would occasionally, without warning, stop making toast until you turned it off and turned it back on again. Everyone would hate Microsoft toasters, but nonetheless would buy them since most of the good bread only works with their toasters.

A toaster manufactured by Apple would do everything the Microsoft toaster does, but five years earlier.

Hope this clears it all up for you. Uncle Bilbo raises a toast to all of you in hopes of a better week than yesterday would lead him to expect.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

2 comments:

Mike said...

I checked your blog 5 or six times today and this was the first time I could get anything to pop up.

Crosby Kenyon said...

Pretty creative. Amusing. Very referential.