This is why I order out

We have three cats… the two youngest (ages 5 and 4yo), the mother/daughter team of Mia and Sayuki, are pretty chill. Issy, the matriarch at 11yo, is a bone-deep, shit in your shoes, puke on your bed, curmudgeon. She also likes to get on the kitchen counters.

Lately, she has also been jumping onto the stove. Which she did sometime this weekend. The only reason I know this is because Mister has been working nights so he can go into work when the office is empty – shelter in place, social distancing sort of stuff – and he found her lounging on the ceramic stovetop when he got home early one morning. The stove jumping happened Saturday night-slash-Sunday morning. This is important later.

I know this, not just because Mister told me he had to shoo her off, but because during her escapade she managed to tap dance on the keypad and locked the oven… as in, locked me out, as in, couldn’t cook anything. I discovered all this while I was attempting to make blueberry scones for Sunday breakfast – I was! – and I couldn’t preheat the oven.

We tried everything. I dug out the owner’s manual and did all the suggested troubleshooting techniques. Mister flipped the breaker thinking the whole ‘turn it off and turn it on” thing might work. It didn’t.

Sunday and Monday we either grilled or ordered take out. Tuesday morning I was determined to find a repair service that made house calls in this social distancing environment.

Before making what could be a very expensive phone call, I chatted with my son. He was rummaging in the fridge looking for something to eat.

“Whatever you want, you can’t use the oven,” I warned him. Then went on to explain what HIS cat (and Issy is technically his cat) did to fud-up the stove.

He then asked obvious and highly annoying questions, like, “did you check the owner’s manual?” and “did you trying turning it off?”

He’s lucky he’s cute.

Then, he did an odd thing. He stepped to the stove and looked closely at the keypad, pressed two of the keys simultaneously, and slowly counted to three. The appliance beeped and the LOC ON message blinked out.

I am today year’s old when I found out my 10-year-old stove has a Locking Function, that two of the numbers on the keypad were enclosed in a thin black oval outline, under which was labeled,” LOCK/UNLOCK HOLD 3 SECONDS.” I thought this had to do with canceling the self-cleaning function. It never occurred to me that I could basically put a Child Lock on my stove.

There was nothing in the manual about this!