The day Mrs Microwave went on an adventure – Hayley Matthews

After Hayley Matthews decided to get rid of her old microwave, it ended up lying in the street until it was ‘saved’ by a mysterious stranger.

Microwave ovens have been around for about 75 years but not everyone is convinced their safe

We had quite a bizarre situation during the week when I had decided that we were no longer going to use our microwave.

I do take little notions like this every now and then and some think I should be sitting with tinfoil on my head – but that’s a step too far!

The microwave had been sitting on the worktop for ages only getting used the odd time to heat up leftover beans or spaghetti, and so I began to feel that it was just taking up a lot of space in our fairly small kitchen.

I’ve never really been a fan of the small nukeing machines anyway as I remember a friend telling me many years ago that they he suspected they cause stomach cancer.

Now before everyone reading this decides to wave their microwave bye bye, according to Google, there is no known research that has found that microwave ovens create cancer-causing substances.

Google also reassures us that studies have shown that food cooked in a microwave is just as safe as food that’s been cooked using alternative methods.

My gut still tells me that cooking food in a pan on the hob seems far more sensible than blasting it with microwave radiation, but nonetheless, we’re all entitled to our own opinion.

And so, it was time to try and give Mrs Microwave a new home.

We gave her a good clean and after 20 minutes contemplating a Facebook sale for a tenner, we decided the charity shop would be best.

To be honest, Facebook and Gumtree can sometimes be more hassle than it’s worth as in my experience people buying on the internet often tend to think they’re dealing with John Lewis and my customer service standards don’t quite match five stars.

I tend to be quite impatient and direct so it’s not really the place for me.

The nearest charity shop said they couldn’t accept it because they were already full from donations.

So, not wanting to dump it, we were delighted when an elderly man stopped us coming out of the charity shop commenting on what a find we’d bagged.

“No, no, we didn’t buy it from the charity shop but we’re actually trying to get rid of it,” Kenny explained.

The gentleman said he’d take it as he lived over the road and so we thought that was the end of the road for our relationship with Mrs Microwave.

A few hours later we took the boys to the park only to find on our way home Mrs Microwave sitting all sad and lonely on the pavement.

Having our hands full with scooters and screaming children we decided to move on, as hard as it was.

But the thought of leaving Mrs Microwave to fend for herself on the streets, with cats peeing up against her, young scallywags using her as a spring board and teenagers mocking her brown crusty digits and dials from the distance, was too much for me and just as I was convincing Kenny to go back up the road with the car to pick her, he started laughing hysterically.

“You’ll never believe this,” he said “but somebody [not the old guy that took it off me] has only gone and put Mrs Microwave up for sale on Facebook for £15.”

We were both delighted and happy that somebody through being tenacious and quick thinking had managed to score themselves 15 quid.

I hope they spend their £15 well, you never know, maybe it helped someone pay their food shop for the day.

Regardless, I’m delighted that somebody has managed to reap the benefit of selling on old Mrs Microwave – hats off to them!

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