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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/Proper-Application69 on 2024-09-30 23:19:30+00:00.

I was working at home very late and got hungry so I threw a frozen egg, sausage, and cheese biscuit in the microwave. I cook most stuff in the microwave on a low setting. My oven has inverter technology so it’s particularly good at cooking slowly. Low-power cooking with an inverter allows the food to heat more evenly, and cooks certain things better - like without changing texture. These biscuits come out heated perfectly through every time. It’s truly amazing.

So I put it in for 6 minutes at 20% power. When it was done I flipped the sandwich over and set it for another 12 minutes. I returned to my desk and worked. My mind was deeply in my work.

I’m always smelling food being cooked by neighbors and sometimes they make really good smelling stuff. After a couple minutes sitting my there I noticed the smell of something delicious - but only in the background. I didn’t think about it - it registered way in the back of my mind somewhere.

After another couple minutes, I smelled someone baking a cake or something. It was a unique sweet aroma, and again it smelled delicious. For this, my conscious mind picked up on it just enough to sort of think “Wow, that smells amazing, but why are my neighbors baking at 2:00 am?”

Another minute, again deeply focused, I started to detect something uncomfortable happening, but I couldn’t pull my mind away from my work (ADHD hyperfocus is a bitch). Another minutes after that I became aware of what the discomfort was - I was something burning. My neighbors totally screwed up. Oh well. Again, I was deeply focused.

Another minute and the smell pulled me out of my work-focus and I thought “They really burnt the shit out of their food.”

FINALLY, my brain was able to get a message to me - “DUDE! YOU’VE GOT FOOD IN THE MICROWAVE! IS THAT WHAT’S BURNING!?”

I jumped up and ran to the kitchen and the smell got really strong, and then I saw the microwave. Thick, dense, brown-gray smoke was pouring out the top like some kind of industrial waste-burning chimney. The room was filling with the acrid smoke quickly. It was very uncomfortable to breathe. I opened the microwave and once the rest of the smoke cleared I saw my biscuit. A charred lump of black ex-food, smoldering, still emitting whisps of smoke.

It turned out that I set the oven time for 10 minutes but I was so focused on my work that I forgot to set the power to 20%, so the thawed biscuit continued to cook at 1100 watts for 8 minutes. My kitchen exhaust fan was on, so the aromas and smoke were mostly pulled out the window so it took a long time for it to reach me.

Since I didn’t smell it quickly, the oven had the opportunity to cook the living crap out of the sandwich. It had probably been smoking for a couple minutes and I didn’t didn’t smell it. I opened windows and let the exhaust fan clear all the smoke. For the next week, everything in my kitchen continued to smell like that awful smoke. It’s now two weeks after that happened, and the kitchen is okay except for my expensive inverter technology microwave which still smells as if there’s currently burning waste inside.

The smoke was so dense it had to have coated all the electronics inside with thick soot. I’m sure the smell will go away, but at this point I’m thinking 4 months, and I imagine the soot will shorten it’s life. Bummer, man.

tldr: Forgot to properly set the microwave and filled my kitchen with smoke from the burning food inside.