By Steve Galea

Because I am a 60-year-old man, I have now collected a plethora of things that bother me to no end. Having things bother you to no end is one of the greatest things about being 60 and older, mostly because it gives you rants to share with the curious world around you.
People expect it from you.
That’s why, the other day, I thought I would declare one of my pet peeves to Jenn. In my defense, I thought it was what she wanted because, earlier in the day, she noted that she appreciates any conversation that asks the important questions.
So, I walked out of the kitchen and said, “Why can’t anyone make reliable drawers?”
“What?” she said. “What do you mean?”
“I want drawers that open properly. It shouldn’t be that hard to access the junk inside. Am I right?”
Apparently, she doesn’t appreciate these conversations nearly as much as she professes.
Her response was, “I’d rather not hear any more.” And then, she covered her ears, started humming loudly, and quickly ran out of the kitchen.
You could hardly blame her. After all, if you thought about the drawer at the bottom of your oven too much, you’d get upset too.
Trust me. I have outlived at least five ovens in my life and not one has had a good bottom drawer on it. This is irksome, to say the least.
That’s because the bottom drawer of your oven is the place where you put the noisiest things in your kitchen. These include cookie pans, grill tops, and anything else that you could bang and rattle together to wake the dead.
That’s why people try to open the bottom drawer of their oven gently – which would be easy, if they came with a drawer that opened smoothly. Unfortunately, they don’t.
As a result, what happens in my experience is something akin to a train derailment, only noisier.
In every oven I have ever owned, the drawer starts to roll out smoothly, lulling you into a false sense of security. And then, through no fault of the operator, it suddenly goes off the rails violently. When I was younger, I thought it was just because I was lousy at opening drawers. I actually thought I’d get the hang of it with age and experience. I did not blame the person who designed the drawer.
Here I am, many years later, and I haven’t got the hang of it yet. Nor has anyone else I know.
In fact, a quick survey of every one of my oven-owning friends suggests that 90 per cent of them have had the same experience and the other 10 per cent haven’t, but only because they thought the handle was purely decorative. That last 10 per cent represents my good friends, by the way.
Look, we can send a man to the moon. We can guide missiles across half the world. We can build multi-mile long bridges. We can even create socks with individual toes – individual toes, for God’s sake! Yet, we can’t make an oven with a drawer that rolls out smoothly.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why. After all, oven technology has improved in leaps and bounds over the last few decades. We now have timers and temperature sensors and self-cleaning features. Yet, the bottom drawer has remained essentially unchanged since the first one. I suspect this is probably because it was designed by the same guy who invented the vegetable drawers in your fridge!
Don’t even get me started about that…