Microwave popcorn…it’s a great invention.  Even if you don’t know how to boil water on an oven or are confused about how long to microwave leftover Chinese food, microwave popcorn is always there for you.  Anybody can do it.  You read the back, it tells you the time to put it in for, and that’s it.  Sometimes microwaves even have a button called “popcorn” that takes care of it for you.  Now listen; we can’t pop a perfect bag.  Sometimes a few pieces get overcooked and you get that purple/blackish look that’s just devastating.  I know a lot of us out there strive for perfection and try to put it in for the perfect time and pop every piece, but it just doesn’t happen.  There are too many damn factors and variables.  But there is no excuse for when you are given piss poor popping directions.  That’s what happened to me yesterday.

Now microwave popcorn comes in different sized bags all the time, but what’s great about it is that they always give you an appropriate time variable, like pop between 2:20 and 3:00.  The same thing happened here.  Keep in mind this was a pretty small bag.  Look, I normally go for bigger ones, but it was just for me and I wanted a light snack, so get off my back!  Anyways, the time it told me was between 1 and 3 minutes.  This is a large time variable so I was a little concerned.  I decided to go conservative at 2:05.  I left 55 seconds off and the bag came up completely burnt!  WTF!!  And usually when you burn the popcorn a little, most of the bag is still edible, but the entire bag here became one giant black hole!  It had to be completely thrown away.  Totally uneatable!

I’m just so upset about this, I can barely stand it.  How can the directions be so far off?!  I went conservative at 2:05!  This is absolutely unacceptable!  Now it’s fair to note that the bag says “depending on the wattage of the microwave.”  Okay, I know a lot of you are saying, “Yeah, it’s your fault.  You need to pay attention to the power level on the microwave and you would have known how long to put it in for.”  BULL.

First of all, who the hell pays attention to the wattage level of the microwave?  And secondly, the whole point of microwave popcorn is so cooking morons such as me have a ridiculously easy quick snack to eat.  If you are the type of person who cooks microwave popcorn, you don’t pay attention to microwave wattage levels!  But most importantly, even if I did know the wattage level, I still went a low time amount within their range (2:05).  The fact of the matter is the directions to pop between 1 and 3 minutes is so unbelievably off, no matter what type of microwave you have.

So after I angrily threw the bag away, I put in another bag and went super conservative at 1:20.  For the most part, this was fine.  There were a decent amount of kernels that weren’t popped, but nothing too serious.  The point I’m trying to make is that this bag should have been between 1 and 2 minutes, not 2 and 3.  In fact, the bag says “For best popping results, set time for 3 minutes.”  If I set that bag for 3 minutes, my house would have blown up.  Unbelievable.

This topic gave me 8 ‘Oy veys’ of annoyance out of 10