That's E-Neff

Warming Up

This picture taken on Sunday, two days after it was professionally cleaned and 30 seconds after it was unprofessionally cleaned by me. Note no magnetic twizzle thing.

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I tried to make my breakfast stir fry (yes, I have tuna stir fry for breakfast - if you do it to you could have a body like mine) but I couldn’t work out why the hob wasn’t working. The little light that says the induction hob needs cleaning came up. But the hob was perfectly clean. It hadn’t been used since the cleaners came in yesterday.

As I woke up a bit I realised that I wasn’t able to make the rings work because the little twirly magnetic knob that lets you do that was missing.

You can move it around pretty easily - not sure why. We inherited this kitchen with the house. I wouldn’t have gone for induction personally, but we’ve got used to it.

The knob thing had to be around somewhere, but I looked high and low and also near the hob and it wasn’t anywhere. I managed to cook my breakfast in my office where there’s a kitchen that I didn’t think I needed, and then found the manual for the hob and found out how to make it work without the knob. But it’s complicated and annoying and where the fuck had the magnetic thing got to.

Now when you live in a house with children you have to suspect them, but they both claimed to know nothing about it and they’ve had a year to play silly buggers with stuff so it seemed unlikely they’d start now. Or continue in the lie once we’d let them know they wouldn’t be in trouble.

They’d had a couple of friends over yesterday, but would they really have wanted to steal a hob magnet thing? We checked with their parents.

The knob had been there yesterday breakfast time and no one had used the hob since then (I’d been out for lunch and cooked salmon in the oven for dinner and the kids had been out for pizza). The only other people who’d touched the hob since then were the cleaners. It was possible, in fact likely, that the cleaners might have moved the control as they wiped off all the dirt. Again they’ve been cleaning for us for a year and never done that. But we texted and checked and they had no news for us. We asked if they could check that it hadn’t accidentally knocked it into their bucket or something (again, it wasn’t very likely that they would choose this moment to steal anything and if they had a magnetic knob for a specific hob would make a pretty crappy haul- though I’ve looked them up and they’re quite expensive). They didn’t have it and didn’t remember touching it. It seems most likely that something happened to it in the cleaning process as they were the last people I know of to touch the hob, but it seems highly unlikely that they could have consciously or unconsciously taken it with them. It sort of has to be in the house, even if someone moved it.

But I spent all day looking in drawers and cupboards and under the fridge. I emptied out all the bins (and there’s loads as I have separate ones for rubbish, recycling, soft plastic and cardboard/paper). I checked that it hadn’t got magnetically stuck to anything metal.

This kind of thing drives me insane. I was tempted to just buy another one, but couldn’t find the model number for my hob (I have it now) and didn’t want to spend £80-£110 on the wrong thing. Or £80-£110 on something that all logic said had to be in the house. And should be within three feet of the hob.

It’s fucking vanished.

I’ve been feeling quite relaxed and happy this week but this was so frustrating and annoying and impossible that my day was entirely ruined. I woke up in the middle of the night, trying to think of places it might be, unable to sleep. Could it somehow be in the catflap? Has Wolfie eaten it (if so I don’t want to use it any more even if we recover it)?

Where is my magnetic little twizzle thing? Am I going to have to buy a new one? Or am I going to persist in turning on the hob, pressing the alarm and the timer button for 4 seconds and then using one button to toggle through the rings and another two (one of which is really unresponsive) to adjust the heat? Or cook everything in my annexe? Or should I just buy a new hob? Or am I going to burn my house down and run away?

Why does this bother me so much? Why has it ruined my weekend? How can something like this disappear? And why is it inevitable that the only way to find it is to buy a new one, which will mean I immediately find the original?

This blog is mainly for future historians who wouldn’t otherwise know about this 21st Century problem. From the looks of it, most hobs now have the command bit integrated into the design. Because it’s fucking stupid having a detachable bit that can stick to any piece of metal and disappear.

How was your Saturday?