On Ovens and Mysogeny

Well, I finally solved the problem of the oven drawer.

The oven drawer, you see, was continually falling off one or either side of its rails. It has bothered me since Day One, and today I figured it out.

I figured it out, because I had to clean the oven, which is a fate worse than death.

Let me explain. I don't know how a man cleans an oven, (probably gets his wife, girlfriend, mother or sister to do it for him...) but when I clean an oven, I want it clean.

Everywhere.

That includes the roof of the oven, where you can't get at it, because the stupid top heating element is wired in place.

The can of oven cleaner says clearly, "Do not spray on oven elements, oven light, or themometer."

It fails to explain how you're supposed to clean the oven without spraying all those things which are WELDED into place!

I remember, in my 20s, I dutifully took out the oven light bulb and wrapped everything I could see in tin foil before spraying the bejeezuz out of the oven.

F**k that! Life is short! Besides, that was THIRTY-FIVE years ago! There weren't even computers thirty-five years ago! You mean to tell me there's been no progress in all that time?

In all that time, only the self-cleaning oven has made a difference in how an oven gets clean. But I digress.

The oven roof. The back of the oven, the sides, the bottom, and the door. They all need to be cleaned.

And in between where the door meets the oven wall, and the (unseen) bottom of the oven door and the sides of the oven door.

I tried to get the oven door off. No luck. There are little clips to hold the hinges open when you take the door off, but door wouldn't budge.

So I cleaned it with the door on.

Oh, bliss.

So, when you get up in the morning, after you've sprayed the oven the night before, (gag, choke, cough, sputter), first you wipe and wipe and wipe with paper towels, then you wash and wash all the surfaces. And the stupid part is that you have to get your hands and fingers jammed in between the oven elements and the oven surfaces, stuffing the paper towls and wet rags as hard as you can to wipe/scrape the gunk off. It's awkward. It's hard on the back - even if you CAN get the door off. And it takes hours to do it completely from start to finish.

The biggest innovation in oven elements since I was in my 20s is that you can now lift the front end of the bottom element about an inch and a half off the bottom of the oven, so you can wipe beneath it.

Let me tell you something. In cooktops, before they made them ceramic, there used to be coils.

These coils were removable for cleaning underneath them.

Hey! Why don't they make the oven elements removable, so you can clean under (and above them?!

What a great idea!

Why don't they?

Because MEN, who MAKE the damned ovens, have never had to CLEAN one in their lives, that's why! Because MEN don't care if the top of the oven is clean, WOMEN care.

And women don't count. Women's work is unpaid, and unappreciated.


You know when, and why, the self-cleaning oven got invented? It got invented after men's wives divorced them and they had to clean their own f*****g ovens.

Before women could divorce, there were no self-cleaning ovens.

And the drawer? Well, after I took everything out and washed it and washed the rails it sits on and the wheels that it runs on, I lay down and took a good look at the structure of the oven and the structure of the drawer.

There's a little lip of the oven drawer that hangs over a little wheel, and that's what the drawer runs on. The wheels on the bottom of the drawer itself are only for balance (read - decoration), the actual weight of the drawer is carried by that little lip sitting attached (at the top of the drawer run) to the oven. And when I say little, I mean it's about an eighth of an inch deep. So it comes off real easily if you lift the drawer even an eighth of an inch.

So, all these years, when I had carefully been lifting the drawer because I thought the bottom wheels were sliding off, I was in fact lifting the tiny lip off the wheels that actually hold the drawer in place.

In other words, I need to push down while pulling the drawer out and pushing it in.

Down.

Not what kind of ass-backwards brains would come up with a scheme like that?

Oh, yeah...