Yesterday I tackled some of my “I hate” jobs around the house. Specifically, washing the kitchen curtains, crawling around on hands and knees to scrub out the corners, mopping, and the biggest dragon of all:  cleaning the oven. Admittedly a self-cleaning oven makes things easier, but this is a weird sucker which is not necessarily all that effective and I still have to crawl in there and scrub the thing. In order to do that without leaning on the oven door (thus potentially breaking the door) and feeling like a comic sketch of someone trying to gas herself, you take the door off, right?

Right. Getting the door off is a bit of a struggle, but it’s not outrageously difficult. The problem, however, is that you want to—eventually—put the door back on.

I’ve decided that household appliances are designed by folks who never actually use the things, much less clean them. In order to get the door back on, you have to lay it flat, squeeze down one pair of levers, mash up another, and shove the levers into the slots before you lose your grip. Sounds easy? Forget it. It takes brute force, a fine sense of balance, keen hand and eye coordination, and a decent back. And of course the instruction manual is less than instructive, so you spend a frustrating half hour acquiring bruises as you try and get the right hooks in the right holes without losing your temper to such an extent that you sling the doggoned door across the kitchen or out on the nearest trash heap. You think seriously about alternatives to replacing the door at all, and if there were any, you know that 10-pound piece of metal and glass would even now be imitating a frisbee across the yard.

Eventually all the pieces come together, thanks to a spouse who is strong enough to provide the necessary brute force and, when to both of your surprise the thing is actually in place, makes you promise to never, never, never take it off again.

We both collapsed in a couple of recliners afterward, sweating and taking deep breaths to get past the urge to throttle someone even as we commented on that someone’s stupidity. How rocket science would it be to make an oven which didn’t need months of training and world-class muscles to remove or return the oven door?

Then he had a brilliant idea. “We should go to the stores and take the oven doors off,” he said, with the idea that the sales clerk would then put the doors back on. Five seconds later, he had reconsidered the idea. “No. We should make them demonstrate taking the doors off and putting them back on. For all the ovens.”

I gotta tell ya . . . If I were in the market for an oven right now or had even a halfway-decent excuse for doing so, I bloody well would.