I'm doing two days consultancy in Cornwall. Yesterday for the folks at Research Instruments in Falmouth and today for the folks at Absolute Software in Redruth. Both are really great places to work and it's a joy visiting them.
I'm staying at the Penventon hotel. My usual breakfast routine is tea, porridge, and toast. They have a big silver toaster. You put your slices of bread into the front, it pulls them in slowly, applies a lot of heat, and then drops them down a shute.
Yesterday they came out mostly black.
I tried scraping them with a knife. I won't bother next time. They never taste good when you do that. All I did was create black dust for someone to waste time cleaning up. They didn't taste good. I didn't eat them.
I was reminded of the joke:
How do you make toast?
You burn bread and scrape the burn off.
Today I put my toast in the same as before. The toaster slowly pulled them in, applied heat, and dropped them down the chute. The slices were under toasted this time. So I put the slices in again. The toaster pulled them in again, applied heat again, and dropped them down the chute again. Just right. No knives. No scraping. No black dust. No cleaning up. I added marmalade. I ate them. Lovely.
