It Was Just a Potato

Well, I'm not entirely sure what this post is specifically about. There's no deep metaphorical meaning that I can think of yet. Yet, being the key word. Maybe by the end of it I'll have something worked up, but for now I'm just going to think of this one as a story. I haven't been up to very much lately, just a lot of work, but I did move into the sorority dorm two Thursdays ago! I guess I'll start there.

The whole process of moving was quite an ordeal to begin with. Moving into a dorm is always a big pain in the rear, ya know? I never know if I have too much stuff (probably) or not enough stuff (doubtful) or if I should get some extra stuff before the move or if I should just wait and unpack to see what kind of stuff I need to get. If you know me at all, you know that the latter option is definitely my least favorite, due to my total lack of patience which has everything to do with my personality and nothing to do with my being from the north. AHEM.

Surprisingly enough, I didn't have hardly problems! Except for the one about all the stuff. I had a lot of stuff.

So I survive my first weekend in the dorm easily. A couple quick trips to Walmart and Target and we're good to go. With a cart full of healthy groceries including strawberries, turkey, baby spinach and last but not least potatoes, I was feeling so optimistic about my ability to easily cook a quick and healthy meal in our little kitchenette and eat with my sisters in the common room while we watch shark week and do crafts all night long. Living the sorority-girl life.

Well, then Monday night rolls along. Pasta and a baked potato sound SO good to me, regardless of the insane amount of carbs that meal would contain. Pasta was easy and silly little me thought the baked potato would be even easier. The obvious answer would be to make the baked potato in the microwave. So I set about  to do just that. I put the little (LITTLE being the key word here. It was a really small potato, perfect for my high-in-carbohydrates dinner for 1) potato in the microwave for like, uhm, 8 minutes? Maybe 10? That's definitely a good time for a potato in the microwave. I poked some holes in it with a fork, plopped it in a bowl, stuck it in the zapper and went about my merry way making pasta and hanging out.

8 minutes go by.

9.

Something smells weird. Kinda smokey. Like popcorn that's almost all the way burnt, but not quite. Who was making popcorn? It was definitely starting to burn. Whoever that was seriously needed to check on their popcorn.

10 minutes and my microwave timer goes off. The popcorn smoke had somehow made its way into my room. If whoever made that stupid popcorn didn't get it out of the microwave it was going to set the fire alarms off, and I had heard that they were very sensitive in the sorority dorms. No matter, I'll just get my potato out of the microwave. I open the microwave and all I can see in there is...

you guessed it.

smoke. a lot of smoke.

I turn to Bethany and hold up the tiny bowl full of smoking potato, I'm sure I looked super confused. And stupid. Of course she was on FaceTime with her mom, who also got to see the smoking potato.

"Uhh, gotta go mom! Bye!" was all I heard her say as the inevitable fire alarms started screaming. Leave it to me to do this not only on everyone's fifth day living in the building, but also on a night when my chapter adviser Kristi and her 4 year-old daughter are paying us a visit. Duh. Why wouldn't it be that way? So I guess I just dropped the hot potato and the bowl on the ground as our floor manager Katie and RA Emma are filing us down the stairs, out of the building..

Seriously. Is this real life? It was just a freaking potato!

So we get outside. Everyone in the whole Appleby East building. It was like 15 people which wasn't bad, but still. There was a 4 year-old there.

Whatever. And we're all standing out there waiting to see what's going to happen, everyone asking me what the heck I thought I was doing, trying to burn the place down? Did I hate it that much already? My answer of course was no, it was just a potato!! So then we hear the sirens. I'm expecting at least one fire truck and a couple firemen to come check it out. WRONG. Instead not one, not two, but THREE firetrucks and a fire department SUV come blazing down the road and into our parking lot where everyone's standing, grilling me about the potato.

The fire marshal? Deputy? I don't know, whoever was in the SUV gets out and wants to know whodunnit, and what the heck happened. I calmly explain to him that it was just a potato in the microwave, when I suddenly remember that my pasta and sauce are still cooking on the stove. Upon hearing this, the fire marshal dude looks at me like I'm an idiot (which at this point I guess I am) and tells all the other fireman to go on in there and check it out. I'm kinda just thinking that they're gonna walk up there and take a look around, then come back down and give us a quick lesson about fire safety. WRONG AGAIN. These guys pull out all the stops! They had on all their gear: oxygen tanks, helmets..everything. You name it, they had it on, like they were going to stop a class 5 forest fire.

Dying of embarrassment.

Well, all the firemen come back outside, shaking their heads like  some kind of dumb blonde just burnt a potato in the microwave, which makes me feel kinda bad for wasting their time because that's exactly what happen. They gave us the go ahead to go back inside and continue our night of arts, crafts and shark week. Of course we did just that, after opening every window possible and turning on every fan we had in an attempt to get rid of the burnt-potato smell.

Later that night as all of my sisters and I sat around our common room table and worked on our cutsie little crafts, I explained the situation and the odd smell to my sister Rachel, who fortunately missed the whole ordeal. Of course she's cracking up, when all of the sudden she looked at me and said,

"Why didn't you just press the potato button?"

The potato button. The gosh darn potato button. I grew up knowing how to cook, and I should have known that there was a potato button; It's purpose being specifically to tell the microwave to make a baked potato.


This whole ordeal hurt my pride so badly that I still haven't looked at my microwave to see if it even has a potato button. Because honestly, I just don't want to know.

So I guess here's the moral of the story, along with the deep metaphor: sometimes in life, something is going to seem a lot harder than it has to be. You're going to think very carefully about what you should do, and how it will turn out for you in the end, and it might be a very elaborate plan that requires extra time and quite possibly some unnecessary effort and some even more unnecessary consequences (like 3 firetrucks, lights a-flashin and everything). But before you rush into carrying out all of the plans for your problem, look to see if there's a more practical solution.



Always look to see if there's a potato button, because you might really get burned if you don't.